Enrique M. Buelna. Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice

One of Enrique Buelna’s motivations to research and write Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice was to make visible the history of Mexican Americans in the United States. But have Mexican Americans been invisible as the author claims? After all, academic associations, book and journal publishers, college and university history departments have recognized the important role Latinos have played in American history for decades. Mexican American and Latino history has been acknowledged as American history. But the vast and superb intellectual production in Mexican American history, anthropology, and social sciences—included in the book’s bibliography—cannot erase the jarring disconnect between what we know and the lack of political power, economic equality, and social justice of the Mexican American population in the United States. Buelna tackles that history from the viewpoint of labor activism and through the life of an untiring crusader, Ralph Cuarón. Born in 1923 to Mexican parents, Cuarón’s long-standing objective, despite persecution and family trouble, was to make life better for the Mexican community in East Los Angeles during the 1940s and all the way to the 1980s and become an inspiration to others. A tenacious and irritating critic of social and economic inequality, an innovative organizer, Cuarón sought fellow Mexican Americans to act on their own behalf in numerous projects, including vast community housing. The book is more than the life of one labor organizer. It traces the persistent marginalization of Mexican Americans from meaningful participation in American life outside the space they had carved out for themselves through local and gradually national organization and against enormous odds, including the denial of that proper space

Economic Justice · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Population · Power (physics · Social history (medicine · Sociology · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Medicine