Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era. Edited by Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Rafael Aguilera
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Civil Rights Era

“The Magna Carta to Liberate Our Cities”

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-398
Author(s):  
Casey D. Nichols
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Model Cities ◽  
Lyndon Johnson ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

Starting in 1964, the U.S. federal government under President Lyndon Johnson passed an ambitious reform program that included social security, urban renewal, anti-poverty initiatives, and civil rights legislation. In cities like Los Angeles, these reforms fueled urban revitalization efforts in communities affected by economic decline. These reforms closed the gap between local residents and government officials in California and even subsequently brought the city’s African American and Mexican American population into greater political proximity. Looking closely at the impact of the Chicano Movement on the Model Cities Program, a federal initiative designed specifically for urban development and renewal, this article brings the role of U.S. government policy in shaping social justice priorities in Los Angeles, and the U.S. Southwest more broadly, into sharper view.

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

The King of Adobe

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorena Oropeza
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Land Grants ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Land Dispossession ◽  
Martin Luther King

In 1967, Reies López Tijerina led an armed takeover of a New Mexico courthouse in the name of land rights for disenfranchised Spanish-speaking locals. The raid thrust Tijerina and his cause into the national spotlight, catalyzing an entire generation of activists. The actions of Tijerina and his group, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants), demanded that Americans attend to an overlooked part of the country’s history: the United States was an aggressive empire that had conquered and colonized the Southwest and subsequently wrenched land away from people who lived there—Mexicans and Native Americans alike. To many young Mexican American activists at the time, Tijerina and the Alianza offered a compelling and militant alternative to the nonviolence of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. Tijerina's place at the table among the nation’s leading civil rights activists was short-lived, but his analysis of land dispossession and his prophetic zeal for the rights of his people was essential to the creation of the Chicano movement.  In this fresh and unvarnished biography, Lorena Oropeza traces the origins of Tijerina's revelatory historical analysis to the years he spent as a Pentecostal preacher and his hidden past as a self-proclaimed prophet of God. Confronting allegations of anti-Semitism and accusations of sexual abuse, the narrative captures the life of a man—alternately mesmerizing and repellant—who changed our understanding of the American West and the place of Latinos in the fabric of American struggles for equality and self-determination.

Black Lives Matter and the revitalization of collective visionary leadership

Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 174271502097592
Author(s):  
Sarah J Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Visionary Leadership ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Black Queer

Herein, I share a conversation with Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, as context to detail the collective visionary leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. After highlighting how Garza enacts this tradition in the contemporary era, I revisit Ella Baker’s foundational model of collective visionary leadership from the civil rights era. Collective visionary leadership, embodied across these generations, is local and community-based, centers the power and knowledge of ordinary people, and prioritizes transformative accountability and liberatory visions of the future. Such leadership has been central to a range of transformational movements, and especially those anchored by Black women and Black queer folk. I also consider what critiques of traditional models of leadership collective visionary leadership levies both past and present. I call on all those concerned with the act of leading justly to take up this model.

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