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The following three articles by Chicano/a writers depict the left within that movement in the Southwest during the years 1965-1975. The first article is an overview of the movement by Jorge Mariscal. Arnoldo Garcia offers a study of the Centro de Accion Social Autonomo (CASA), probably the best-known organization on the Chicano/Mexicano left in the 1965-1975 period. Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez's article focuses on left and other radical forces within the movement in New Mexico.-P.B.
The recycled stereotype of the Chicano movement of the Vietnam war era as a narrowly nationalist and separatist social movement continues to dominate contemporary historiography. The feminist critique of the movimiento which began in the late 1960s and developed into the 1980s was certainly a necessary adjustment to foundational Chicano/a intellectual and activist agendas. But the faux-radicalism fashionable in U.S. universities by the late 1980s cast early Chicano/a militancy in much the same light as did the neoconservative project during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton period. Coupled with academic pronouncements condemning "master narratives" and "essentialisms," a multifront revisionist project designed to discredit the entire 1960s inevitably targeted the movimiento.
By misrepresenting the multiple ideologies that informed the Chicano movement as a single current of reactionary cultural nationalism or "identity politics" riddled by sexism, internal dissension, "anti-Americanism," and even "reverse racism," revisionist historians (some of Mexican-American descent) have deprived future generations of a complete portrayal of Chicano/a activism in one of the more revolutionary periods in American history. The reality of the movimiento between the crucial years of 1965 and 1975 was one of great intellectual ferment in which competing political agendas vied for the attention of ethnic Mexican youth.
Although Marxist-inspired thought had always been a minority tradition in Mexican-American communities, there were well-known figures in the socialist and trade union movements whose activities stretched back to the period immediately before the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The writings of Ricardo Flores Magon, for example, introduced anarcho-syndicalism to early Mexican American activists, and Magon's Partido Liberal Mexicano attracted working people on both sides of the border. During the same period, Mexican-American trade unions such as the Confederacion de Uniones Obreras, founded in 1928 in Los Angeles, struggled to contest the exploitation of agricultural workers. In the 1930s, organizers such as Bert Corona, Emma Tenayuca,...