Chicano Quotes

Yo no soy mexicano. Yo no soy gringo. Yo no soy chicano. No soy gringo en USA y mexicano en Mexico. Soy chicano en todas partes. No tengo que asimilarme a nada. Tengo mi propia historia.

The enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men. We all have the same enemy. The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind. The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized.

No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.

Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough'. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable -- this is Marcos.

The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian--our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the "real" world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.

We’re afraid the others will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be “real” Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience.

I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences.

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall.

Deslenguadas. Somos las del español deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos —we speak an orphan tongue

No one lacks voice. Not even the dead. But many lack ears, the ability to hear those stories out of which the most destitute of people are forging their destines, breathing life into bleached bones.

As to whether Marcos is gay: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal,… a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.

I'm in crisis. I'm about to bump with a five-foot chino-chicano.

I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It is another borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone.

Lately, when asked, I have tended to say that I'm Mexican. I like the word because it still makes so many people flinch.

stupid america stupid america, see that chicano with a big knife on his steady hand he doesn’t want to knife you he wants to sit on a bench and carve christfigures but you won’t let him. stupid america, hear that chicano shouting curses on the street he is a poet without paper and pencil and since he cannot write he will explode. stupid america, remember that chicano flunking math and english he is the picasso of your western states but he will die with one thousand masterpieces hanging only from his mind.

What's a kiss? The sound loneliness makes when it dies.

A hippie is like a cockroach. So are the beatniks. So are the Chicanos. We’re all around, Judge. And judges do not pick us to serve on Grand Juries

The smell of rain is rich with life.

On May 19, Malcolm X’s birthday, two police had been machine-gunned on Riverside Drive. I felt sorry for their families, sorry for their children, but i was relieved to see that somebody else besides Black folks and Puerto Ricans and Chicanos was being shot at. I was sick and tired of us being the only victims, and i didn’t care who knew it. As far as i was concerned, the police in the Black communities were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people at whim and without restraint. I despise violence, but i despise it even more when it’s one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.

Rain knows the earth and loves it well, for rain is the passion of the earth.

my parents are Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexican Americans or Chicanos. i am a Chicano from Chicago which means i am a Mexican American with a fancy college degree & a few tattoos. my parents are Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexicans still living in México. those Mexicans call themselves mexicanos. white folks at parties call them pobrecitos. American colleges call them international students & diverse. my mom was white in México & my dad was mestizo & after they crossed the border they became diverse. & minorities. & ethnic. & exotic. but my parents call themselves mexicanos, who, again, should not be confused for mexicanos living in México. those mexicanos might call my family gringos, which is the word my family calls white folks & white folks call my parents interracial. colleges say put them on a brochure. my parents say que significa esa palabra. i point out that all the men in my family marry lighter-skinned women. that’s the Chicano in me. which means it’s the fancy college degrees in me, which is also diverse of me. everything in me is diverse even when i eat American foods like hamburgers, which, to clarify, are American when a white person eats them & diverse when my family eats them. so much of America can be understood like this.

I felt bad because Little Big Tom came in while we were making the tape and was like over the moon because he thought we were interested in his music. We had to humor him and listen to him deliver around six hundred speeches about fusion and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Chicano and Latino influences on pretentious jazzy pseudorock. I think it was probably the happiest I'd ever seen him. And I also felt bad about the fact that after he left we kind of made fun of the funny way he said Latino, like he was the Frito Bandito or something. I felt bad, but I did it anyway, because I'm only human. I was ashamed of myself and depressed afterward, though, which is human, too, I guess. Being human is an excuse for just about everything, but it also kind of sucks in a way.

[Author's note:] When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I would get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then I thought, 'If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' So I began. In the early days of my research, before I'd fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, "Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story." Her encouragement sustained me for the next four years. I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional.

I didn't study the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña because I needed a sample of the "Chicano experience" like a vitamin supplement. I studied these writers and artists because they were the most interesting thinkers.

It’s a great honor, m’ijo. We know that. I’m sure everyone in Ysleta is proud of you. But this is who you are," she said, for a moment scanning the dark night air and the empty street. A cricket chirped in the darkness. "God help you when you go to this ‘Havid.’ You will be so far away from us, from everything you know. You will be alone. What if something happens to you? Who’s going to help you? But you always wanted to be alone; you were always so independent, so stubborn." "Like you.

The denunciation and smearing of truly gifted people like Rodriguez—people the Chicano community should be proud of—by the self-appointed gatekeepers of Chicano Studies is, alas, an everyday spectacle. (Did anyone in the Chicano Studies community even take note when Dana Gioia, who is one of the best poets of his generation and happens to be half Mexican American, was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002? No, because he made it on his merits and not by being a victimization hustler.)

In Berkeley and San Francisco, the revolution didn't seem to far away. A lot of white radicals, hippies, Chicanos, Blacks, and Asians were ready to get down. But i hadn't forgotten the hard hats and the red necks and the bible belt and the so called middle amerikans who had elected Nixon. I couldn't imagine how the "new left" was talking to those people, much less organizing and changing their minds. I decided the only way i would come up with answers was to on keep studying and struggling. I didn't know how half of what i was studying would fit in but i figured it would all come in handy some day. I read about guerrilla warfare and clandestine struggle without having the faintest idea that one day i would go underground. It's kind of funny when i think about it because reading that stuff had probably saved my life a million times.

At Harvard, the strong and savvy and confident thrived, while the nice or shy or quaintly moral were just bit players. In Ysleta, you believed in God because you were poor and needed something to hold on to. At Harvard, you believed in your good luck or bad luck, in all-nighters, in your political savvy.

He said, “WHY DON’T YOU EAT MEAT, PRIVATE? ARE YOU RICH?” He talked like a Chicano Macho Man Randy Savage. I said I wasn’t rich. He said, “I SAW A SHOW ON TV. IT SAID THAT PEOPLE WHO DON’T EAT MEAT HAVE WEAK MINDS. THEY ARE EASY TO BRAINWASH. THAT MEANS THAT YOU ARE EASY TO BRAINWASH.” “YES, DRILL SERGEANT.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But

I know who you are,” the Chicano said to Thomas. “You’re that Indian guy did all the talking.” “Yeah,” one of the African men said. “You’re that storyteller. Tell us some stories, chief, give us the scoop.” Thomas looked at these five men who shared his skin color, at the white man who shared this bus which was going to deliver them into a new kind of reservation, barrio, ghetto, logging-town tin shack. He then looked out the window, through the steel grates on the windows, at the freedom just outside the glass. He saw wheat fields, bodies of water, and bodies of dark-skinned workers pulling fruit from trees and sweat from thin air. Thomas closed his eyes and told this story.

Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.

I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty white chickens. I think that was about the time I fucked up a pair of chicken heads against a warehouse wall when no one was looking. Well, almost no one. Rueben was right behind me, and that's when he grinned his stupid grin. Maybe he hated the chickens as much as I did. Maybe he just knew que ya me iba también a la chingada. Maybe I was going on my first joy ride to hell and back, and it was fun to watch.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.

Everyone has the seventh-grade story where, you know, they make the field trip and then all the white kids start treating them differently,” says Ruben Cordova, a San Antonio art historian. “Davy Crockett’s [death], it’s sort of like a Chicano version of the Jewish Christ killers. If you’re looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin. We killed Davy Crockett.

As much as they were concerned about the police, the Panthers also took seriously the threat of crime and sought to address the fears of the community they served. With this in mind, they organized Seniors Against a Fearful Environment (SAFE), an escort and bussing service in which young Black people accompanied the elderly on their business around the city. In Los Angeles, when the Party opened an office on Central Avenue, they immediately set about running the drug dealers out of the area. And in Philadelphia, neighbors reported a decrease in violent crime after the Party opened their office, and an increase after the office closed. There, the BPP paid particular attention to gang violence, organizing truces and recruiting gang members to help with the survival programs. It may be that the Panthers reduced crime by virtue of their very existence. Crime, and gang violence especially, dropped during the period of their activity, in part (in the estimate of sociologist Lewis Yablonsky) because the BPP and similar groups “channeled young black and Chicano youth who might have participated in gangbanging violence into relatively positive efforts for social change through political activities.

My four years of high school were spent locked up inside “el campo.” I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision.

I held Angie Luna in that room for hours, and I remember the different times we made love like epochs in a civilization, each movement and every touch, apex upon abyss. In the luxury of our bed, we tried every position and every angle. I explored the curves on her body and delighted in seeing the freedom of her ecstasy. Her desperate whispers and pleas. I told her I loved her, and she said she loved me too. We lay in bed with our limbs entangled, in a pacific silence that reminded me of existing on a beach just for the sake of such an existence. I couldn't imagine the world ever becoming better, and for some strange reason the thought slipped into my head that I had suddenly grown to be an old man because I could only hope to repeat, but never improve on, a night like this. I finally took her home sometime when the interstate was empty, and the bridges seemed to lead to nowhere, for they were desolate too.

I learned the language, at the expense of my Spanish, only to find that in English I didn't exist. I read the American history textbooks in school that erased any trace of the deep Mexican roots in this country. Still, I forged ahead.

Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for foices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing n the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

The either/or proposition that forces you to choose between your community and, say, your country has never been true. The very skills we learn to cross borders within ourselves help us to cross borders toward others outside our community.

Hominy got out of the car to untangle the snarl. Waving his arms like the crazy man he was, he separated the cars by color, not that of the respective paint jobs, but by the hue of the motorists. "If you black, get back! White, to the right. Brown, go around. Yellow, follow the sites and let it mellow. Red, full speed ahead! Mulattos, full throttle!" If he couldn't categorize by sight, he asked the drivers what color they were. "Chicano? What color is that? You just can't make up a race, motherfucker. Puto? I got your puto right here pendejo!

Aztlán (“The Place of the Reeds”) was the traditional home of the Aztecs, a possibly mythical motherland from which the tribe ventured forth on a one-hundred-year walk. It was a land to the north of Mexico City. Chicanos recognize Aztlán as being in the American southwest, and it came to represent the stomping ground of “La Chicanada,” or the entirety of the Hispanic west. The Aztecs (Mexica, pronounced “Meshica,” hence, “Chicano”) walked south, out of the deserts, on their way to what would become Mexico City. They apparently walked across the Devil’s Highway on their way home.

Vivo en los Estados Unidos y soy chilena, sangre, voluntad y memoria. Al llegar a este país me obligaron a llenar un formulario en el cual había una casilla referente a la raza: la primera alternativa era blanca, la cual iba a automáticamente yo a marcar, cuando leí más abajo la palabra “Hispanic”. Me pareció una enorme incultura por parte de los funcionarios gringos ya que lo hispano no se refiere a una raza, pero abismada comprendí que por primera vez en mi vida me expulsaban de mi propio nicho, de lo que creía mi identidad natural y objetiva, aunque entre una norteamericana y yo no mediase la más mínima diferencia física ( más aún en este caso específico: soy pelirroja, hasta me parezco a ellos ). Ni que decirlo, marqué con saña el segundo cuadrado y cada día transcurrido de estos seis años me he ido apegando más y más a él. Cuando camino por las calles de la ciudad, a veces me da la impresión de que todos mis antepasados están allí, en la pulcra e impersonal boca del metro, con la esperanza de llegar a alguna parte. Todo chicano o salvadoreño despreciable es mi tío, el hondureño que retira la basura es mi novio. Cuando Reina se declara a sí misma una desclasada, sé exactamente a que se refiere. Toda mi vida ha corrido por este lado del mundo. Mi cuna real y ficticia, el lugar donde nací y el otro que fui adquiriendo, lucen oropeles muy americanos ( ¡ no acepto que ese adjetivo se lo atribuyan los del norte! América es tanto la de arriba como la de abajo, norte y sur tan americanos uno como el otro). Trazo los dos puntos del continente para señalar los míos y agrego un tercero, éste. Dos de ellos resultan razonablemente cercanos, y luego, inevitable, la línea larga baja y baja hasta llegar al sur, hasta lo que, a mi pesar, debo reconocer como el fin del mundo. Sólo los hielos eternos más allá de esa tierra. Allí nací. Mapuches o españoles, fluidas, impredecibles, vigorosas, allí están mis raíces.

You cross a border because you are searching, because you want more, because you want to match where you are with who you are, because you want to test your place. Maybe because you want to expand your sense of place. You are searching for something that may as yet be indefinable. A border crosser questions the very idea of home.

It was ironic, really, that the only reason I became eligible to adjust my status was because I married a U.S. citizen. I laugh when I think about the many times my mom told me, 'You have to be independent. You have to make your own money. Don't depend on a man!' I did. I made my own money. But I still needed a man to save me from my illegality.

What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to account for both observable phenomena and theoretical conundrums that can be explained only by quantum physics: A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In what Wheatley calls “this exquisitely connected world,” the real engine of change is never “critical mass”; dramatic and systemic change always begins with “critical connections.”14 So by now the crux of our preliminary needs should be apparent. We must open our hearts to new beacons of Hope. We must expand our minds to new modes of thought. We must equip our hands with new methods of organizing. And we must build on all of the humanity-stretching movements of the past half century: the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the civil rights movement; the Free Speech movement; the anti–Vietnam War movement; the Asian American, Native American, and Chicano movements; the women’s movement; the gay and lesbian movement; the disability rights/pride movement; and the ecological and environmental justice movements. We must find ourselves amid the fifty million people who as activists or as supporters have engaged in the many-sided struggles to create the new democratic and life-affirming values that are needed to civilize U.S. society.

P.D. MAYORITARIA QUE SE DISFRAZA DE MINORÍA INTOLERADA. A todo esto de que si Marcos es homosexual: Marcos es gay en San Francisco, negro en Sudáfrica, asiático en Europa, chicano en San Isidro, anarquista en España, palestino en Israel, indígena en las calles de San Cristóbal, chavo banda en Neza, rockero en cu, judío en Alemania, ombusdman en la Sedena, feminista en los partidos políticos, comunista en la post guerra fría, preso en Cintalapa, pacifista en Bosnia, mapuche en los Andes, maestro en la CNTE, artista sin galería ni portafolios, ama de casa un sábado por la noche en cualquier colonia de cualquier ciudad de cualquier México, guerrillero en el México de fin del siglo XX, huelguista en la CTM, reportero de nota de relleno en interiores, machista en el movimiento feminista, mujer sola en el metro a las 10 p.m., jubilado en plantón en el Zócalo, campesino sin tierra, editor marginal, obrero desempleado, médico sin plaza, estudiante inconforme, disidente en el neoliberalismo, escritor sin libros ni lectores, y, es seguro, zapatista en el sureste mexicano. En fin, Marcos es un ser humano, cualquiera, en este mundo. Marcos es todas las minorías intoleradas, oprimidas, resistiendo, explotando, diciendo "¡Ya basta!". Todas las minorías a la hora de hablar y mayorías a la hora de callar y aguantar. Todos los intolerados buscando una palabra, su palabra, lo que devuelva la mayoría a los eternos fragmentados, nosotros. Todo lo que incomoda al poder y a las buenas conciencias, eso es Marcos.

The females, in the terrifying, exhilarating experience of becoming rather than reflecting, would discover that they too have been effected by the dynamics of the Mirror World. Having learned only to mirror, they would find in themselves reflections of sickness in their masters. They would find themselves doing the same things, fighting the same way. Looking inside for something there, they would be confused by what would at first appear to be an endless Hall of Mirrors. What to copy? What model to imitate? Where to look? What is a mere mirror to do? But wait - How could a mere mirror even frame such a question? The question itself is the beginning of an answer that keeps unfolding itself. The question-answer is a verb, and when one begins to move in the current of the verb, of the Verb, she knows that she is not a mirror. Once she knows this she knows it s so deeply that she cannot completely forget. She knows it so deeply she has to say it to her sisters. What if more and more of her sisters should begin to hear and to see and to speak? This would be a disaster. It would throw the whole society backward into the future. Without Magnifying Mirrors all around, men would have to look inside and outside. They would start to look inside, wondering what was wrong with them. They would have to look outside because without the mirrors they would begin to receive impressions from real Things out there. They would even have to look at women, instead of reflections. This would be confusing and they would be forced to look inside again, only to have the harrowing experience of finding *there* the Eternal Woman, the Perfect Parakeet. Desperately looking outside again, they would find that the Parakeet is no longer *out there*. Dashing back inside, males would find other horrors: All of the Others - the whole crowd - would be in there: the lazy niggers, the dirty Chicanos, the greedy Jews, faggots and dykes, plus the entire crowd of Communists and the backward population of the Third World. Looking outward again, mirrorless males would be forced to see - people. Where to go? Paroxysm toward the Omega Point? But without the Magnifying Mirror even that last refuge is gone. What to do for relief? Send more bombing missions? But no. It is pointless to be killing The Enemy after you find out The Enemy is yourself.

When she tries to speak of Machismo, she is immediately put down and told "We know all about it, there are many many books written on the subject." She receives nothing but censorship again. She tries so hard to say, "Yes, there is much on Machismo, but can't you Machos look at the women and children who are the VICTIMS of your Machismo?" She tries so much to speak up and instead finds herself speaking to deaf ears and a completely closed mind.

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free.

I look through the window at the huge valley lit up with different colors. The town is cradled by the dark mountains. From afar it looks as if nothing can get in or out, but judging by the stillness of the view it's as if the citizens have made peace with it and have settled without worry into their insular but protected haven each evening. There are people in the world, I imagine, who are born and die in the same town, maybe even in the same house, or bed. Creatures without migration: have they not lived a life because they have not moved? What of the migratory los González, moving from one place to another and marking every stopping place with angst? What kind of alternative is that? For once my father and I are thinking thinking the same way, sharing a similar yearning for our starting points to have been different, for our final destination to be anything other than the tearful, resentful arrival it is likely to be.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

I believe we have reached a point where those of us who belong to this culture of la frontera in Ysleta and El Paso are not content to sit back and watch others tell us who we are. We know who we are, and we ourselves can tell others about what we love and what we fear and what we hate and what can save us. I believe our community has developed that confidence to step forward and start taking responsibility for the many images that are projected in the name of Ysleta and El Paso.

3. Serving Two Masters Derrick Bell has pointed out a third structure that impedes reform, this time in law. To litigate a law-reform case, the lawyer needs a flesh-and-blood client. One might wish to establish the right of poor consumers to rescind a sales contract or to challenge the legal fiction that a school district is desegregated if the authorities have arranged that the makeup of certain schools is half black and half Chicano (as some of them did in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education). Suppose, however, that the client and his or her community do not want the very same remedy that the lawyer does. The lawyer, who may represent a civil rights or public interest organization, may want a sweeping decree that names a new evil and declares it contrary to constitutional principles. He or she may be willing to gamble and risk all. The client, however, may want something different—better schools or more money for the ones in his or her neighborhood.

Again, this week as I walked on Broadway, in front of giant photographs of voluptuous supermodels at a Victoria Secret mega-store, who was rebuilding the sidewalks? With sweaty headbands, ripped-up jeans, and dust on their brown faces? Their muscled hands quivered as they worked the jack-hammers and lugged the concrete chunks into dump trucks. Two men from Guanajuato. Undocumented workers. They both shook my hand vigorously, as if they were relieved I wasn’t an INS officer. I imagined how much money Victoria Secret was making off these poor bastards. I wondered why passersby didn’t see what was in front of their faces. We use these workers. We profit from them. In the shadows, they work to the bone, for pennies. And it’s so easy to blame them for everything and nothing simply because they are powerless, and dark-skinned,and speak with funny accents. Illegal is illegal. It is a phrase, shallow and cruel, that should prompt any decent American to burn with anger.

Two weeks ago, Aaron and Isaac, I learned your mother Laura has breast cancer. My heart feels impaled. These words, so useless and feeble. Laura is only thirty-five years old. Her next birthday will be in only three days. I write this letter to you, my sons, with the hope that one day in the future you will read it and understand what happened to our family. Together, your mother and I have created and nurtured an unbreakable bond that has transformed us into an unlikely team. A Chicano from El Paso, Texas. A Jew from Concord, Massachusetts. I want you to know your mother. She has given me hope when I have felt none; she has offered me kindness when I have been consumed by bitterness. I believe I have taught her how to be tough and savvy and how to achieve what you want around obstacles and naysayers. Our hope is that the therapies we are discussing with her doctors will defeat her cancer. But a great and ominous void has suddenly engulfed us at the beginning of our life as a family. This void suffocates me.

Julia, is everything all right?” her father said in a raspy voice. “It’s three in the morning, m’ija.” “I’m sorry. I have to talk to you; it’s something very important. Papá, Mamá, I’ve made a decision, and I wanted to share it with you. I’ve decided to convert to the Muslim religion.” “What?” Pilar screamed. “Are you out of your mind?” “Julia, what are you saying?” “I want to be a Muslim. I’ve even chosen a new Muslim name, Aliyah.” “Julia, are you drunk?” “No, Papá, I’m not drunk. I’ve thought about this for a very long time. I think it’s the right thing for me, a way to follow God.

A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For days we could hear bombs exploding around us. We just wanted to survive long enough for the Americans to control the territory. We didn’t want to die. At that point, our prison uniforms were the only things to keep us from being shot on the spot by the Americans. That was all we had. Who would the Americans believe? Real prisoners or guards dressed as prisoners? Those devils might even say we were the Germans. This was our nightmare.

We're the first people of the Western Hemisphere. American history doesn't start with Plymouth Rock; it starts with our ancestors. Others might call us "wetbacks," but we've had 40,000 years to dry out.

When Hitler failed, his officers were brought to the US, from inside Rockefeller Center, and to the Bahamas and Southern states to build that dream of the Fourth Reich. It is in this context that the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, labor leaders, judges, entertainers, reporters, authors, students, Black Panthers, Indians, Chicanos and hippies are being slain, and why the masses are being doped into control.

The black children I have come to know in different parts of this country, even those from relatively well-off homes, say critical things about America and its leaders at an earlier age than white children do — and connect their general observations to specific experiences. A black child of eight, in rural Mississippi or in a northern ghetto, an Indian or Chicano or Appalachian child, can sound like a disillusioned old radical.

Sonnet for Thunder Lovers and Primary Colors” When Sweet Nothings Just Don’t Cut It You’re more than soda fizz, than sparklers lit for kids at play, than fireflies’ flit in sky. You spin around my heart and up my thigh with the whistle and boom of a bottle rocket. Baby, those other jugglers’ gigolo tricks— magician’s spell and mime’s unspoken sigh— don’t turn my head, don’t catch my ear or eye, but your mercury rolls in my hip pocket. Some women like the subtle hints, require a pastel touch, a whispered cry and blush, but not me; I am all hyperbole. Your howls of red, your strokes of green sapphire, your cayenne kiss, serrano pepper rush from lip to nape of knee will do for me. from Rattle #12, Winter 1999. Tribute to Latino/Chicano Poets

[Sin ese libro], tú no podrías escuchar nada sobre nuestra tradición de resistencia femenina a la opresión, que se remonta a la mujer nativa que tomó los techos de las casas en lo que luego se convertiría en México e "hizo llover dardos y piedras" sobre los invasores españoles. O a la mujer que, en Oaxaca, demandó a su esposo por abuso y logró que su caso llegara a la corte en 1630. O a las mujeres Maya que encerró al cura español en su iglesia por no aceptar que se enterraran a las víctimas mayas de una epidemia de tifus en tierras de la iglesia. O a las masivas "Revueltas del Maíz" de 1962 realizadas por mujeres que se rehusaban a morir de hambre. [Without a book like this] you would not hear about our tradition of female resistance to oppression, going back to Aztec women who took to the rooftops in what later became Mexico City and ‘rained down darts and stones’ on the invading Spainiards. Or the woman who filed suit in Oaxaca against her husband for abuse and had her case heard in court-in 1630! Or the Maya women who lackeed up the local Spanish priest in his church for not having Maya victims of a typhus epidemic buried in church ground. And the massive ‘Corn Riots’ of 1692 by women who refused to starve.

Pídele a casi cualquier chicana o chicano fuera de la academia que nombre a una mujer famosa de origen mexicano y probablemente vas a escuchar "Dolores Huerta". Si la persona conoce a nuestras escritoras contemporáneas, quizá mencione a "Sandra Cisneros" o "Ana Castillo". Si preguntas por un nombre de los primeros tiempos, te podrán decir Sor Juana, la monja rebelde de los mil seiscientos. Cuando trates de profundizar, la persona a tu lado tal vez va a decir, "iMe doy por vencido!, pero, bueno... ahí está la Virgen de Guadalupe, que creo, está en muchísimas camisetas. Era inevitable entonces, que la necesidad de un libro como este sea finalmente reconocida. Ask almost anyone outside of academia to name famous US women of Mexican origin and you will probably hear ‘Dolores Huerta.’ If the person knows our contemporary writers, maybe ‘Sandra Cisneros’ and ‘Ana Castillo.’ If you ask for a name from earlier times, you might get ‘Sor Juana’-the rebel nun of the 1600’s. When you try to dig deeper, your companion may whimper, ‘I give up! Well…there’s the Virgin of Guadalupe, she’s on a lot of T-shirts. It was inevitable, then, that the need for a book like this would be recognized.

Cuando el movimiento chicano empezó, vimos en Nuevo México, a las Chicana y a otras, trabajando para recuperar las tierras perdidas con la guerra de 1846-48 contra Estados Unidos, miles salieron de las escuelas secundarias para protestar contra el racismo, y muchas se pusieron Boinas Marrones para defender sus comunidades. Nosotros nos unimos a la United Farm Workers como campesinas y apoyamos el boicoteo. Nosotros marchamos en contra de la Guerra de Vietnam el 29 de Agosto de 1970, solo para ser perseguidos, acosadas y maltratadas con los gases lacrimógenos de la policía que incluso mató a tres chicanos ese día. When the Chicano movement began, we saw Chicanas and others in New Mexico working to get back land lost with the 1846-48 US war, thousands walking out of high schools to protest the racism, and many putting on Brown Berets to defend their communities. We joined the United Farm Workers as campesinas and boycott supporters. Thousands of us marched against the Vietnam war on August 29, 1970, only to be chased and struck down by tear-gassing police who also killed three Chicanos that day

I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds, Gloria, the facilitator, Gloria, the mediator, straddling the walls between abysses. "Your allegiance is to La Raza, the Chicano movement,” say the members of my race. “Your allegiance is to the Third World,” say my Black and Asian friends. “Your allegiance is to your gender,” say the feminists. Then there’s my allegiance to the Gay movement, to the socialist revolution, to the New Age, to magic and the occult. And there’s my affinity to literature, to the world of the artist. What am I? A third world lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic leanings. They would chop me up into little fragments and rag each piece with a label. You say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva, a many-armed and -legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world., the man’s world, the women’s, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, an the occult worlds. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web. Who, me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.

I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds, Gloria, the facilitator, Gloria, the mediator, straddling the walls between abysses. "Your allegiance is to La Raza, the Chicano movement,” say the members of my race. “Your allegiance is to the Third World,” say my Black and Asian friends. “Your allegiance is to your gender,” say the feminists. Then there’s my allegiance to the Gay movement, to the socialist revolution, to the New Age, to magic and the occult. And there’s my affinity to literature, to the world of the artist. What am I? A third world lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic leanings. They would chop me up into little fragments and rag each piece with a label. You say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva, a many-armed and -legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world., the man’s world, the women’s, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, an the occult worlds. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web. Who, me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.

In college I was an editorial cartoonist for my school paper, The Daily Aztec...I did straight, news-oriented editorial cartoons. Occasionally, my Chicano background snuck in to the toons simply because I might do a César Chavez toon about how the School Student Board was too stupidly racist to allow him to speak on campus or other anti-frat toons on how they were so racist in doing fund-raisers for Tijuana kid charities--dressed in sombreros and begging with tin cups (from an interview in the book Attitude, 2002)

Well, at least I will have time to say goodbye to my customers." Ramón gave Julieta a quizzical look. "I get they will be upset with the changes, but they will still be glad that you are the chef." "You still don't get it Ramón, do you? Yes, I will be here. But many of my customers will no longer support the place if it's a corporate chain. Of course, you will get new customers, tourists from out of state and residents of the beach towns who think coming to Barrio Logan is some type of Mexican Disneyland, where they can buy churros and take selfies in front of Chicano murals. But many locals will avoid us like ICE. And there will be protesters, including members of my own family and my friends. I can guarantee that." Ramón's throat tightened. "Julieta, you are from the community. And I'm no gringo---I'm Mexican, too." "You're a coconut, Ramón. You may be technically Mexican, but you are not part of this community.

I was not very long there until, like water, I found my own level. 'My people' – the people who knew about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce – were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos. And those who were supposed to be 'my people', the Irish Americans who knew about English misrule and the Famine and supported the civil rights movement at home, and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem, looked and sounded to me like Orangemen. They said exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New York I was given the key to the city by the mayor, an honor not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers.

Protesting this war, Chicano/as rose to condemn the killing fields with the slogan "Raza Si, Guerra No,” we wanted our young men here fighting for justice instead of in a faraway war. (From The Women of Raza)

When the article, "The Woman of La Raza" came out as a result of the 1969 Chicano Conference, I experienced repercussions because I wrote about The Woman. Instead of being intimidated, I felt it necessary to write a whole book on La Mujer.

We live in a country where there are more than 60 million Latinos, making up almost a fifth of the American population. But we aren't the ones narrating our own story; rather we became subjects at the mercy of someone else finding us worthy of taking up space in the world. Until our history, struggles, and unique experiences are unearthed, the whole country will suffer because the American story will remain incomplete. It's incredible what our people have survived in this country, and how little Americans of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds know about it. When our rich past is kept from us, it leaves people to believe that we belong somewhere else—outside this country. Without an accurate telling of our history, we cannot fully address problems that are rooted in the past. When we are viewed as foreigners, our issues become someone else's problems—not America's problems.

...my racial identity is a concept that escapes intellectual conversations about race. My personal experiences contradict the idea that Latino is only an ethnicity and not a race. But suggesting that Latino should be a race confounds the situation even more, because we are all so different and experience the world differently, though the same could be said of any other racial group. When others state, 'Latino is not a race, it's an ethnicity,' they ignore that not all Latinos have the same ethnicity, either. And though we don't all share the same ethnicity, the exact language, religion, customs, culture, food, and so forth, and though we are not the only ethnic group in America, we are the only people who are singled out by our ethnicity.

I've learned that Mexicans, our Indigenous ancestors, have always had a footprint in this land. We have many examples to follow of people who resisted assimilation, who fought for equality. We must shine a light on those who came before us, those who showed us decades ago that we are enough. Through them, I have learned this is where I belong, not because white people accept me, but because the same roots that ground me to Mexico ground me here, too.

Most of this material is accessible in the Dunayevskaya and Glaberman collections in the Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs in Detroit. When occasionally I look up something in the collections, I find it hard to believe that we wrote so much and took on so many literary critics and historians. The Johnson-Forest Tendency consisted of a small number of members—never more than sixty to seventy in an organization of several hundred. But the fervor with which we supported the independent black struggle and attacked the alienation of human beings in the process of capitalist production made us stand out in any gathering. Most members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency were part of the new generation who had joined the radical movement in the 1940s because we wanted to make a second American Revolution—which to us meant mainly encouraging the struggles of rank-and-file workers to take over control of production inside the plant and supporting the black struggle for full social, economic, and political equality. Black, white, Asian, and Chicano, workers and intellectuals, living on the East Coast, West Coast, and in the Midwest, we were a representative sample of the new human forces that were emerging in the United States during World War II. Because CLR could not be publicly active, we acted as his transmission belt to the larger American community. Our little organization was a collective way to know reality.

Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.' Huntington concludes (regretfully) this was no longer possible by the late sixties. Why not? Presidential authority was eroded. There was a broad reappraisal of governmental action and 'morality' in the post-Vietnam/post-Watergate era among political leaders who, like the general public, openly questioned 'the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception—all of which are, in some measure,' according to Huntington, 'inescapable attributes of the process of government.' Congressional power became more decentralized and party allegiances to the administration weakened. Traditional forms of public and private authority were undermined as 'people no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.' ¶ Throughout the sixties and into the seventies, too many people participated too much: 'Previously passive or unorganized groups in the population, blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women now embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled [sic] before. [Italics mine.] ¶ Against their will, these 'groups'—the majority of the population—have been denied 'opportunities, positions, rewards and privileges.' More democracy is not the answer: 'applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames.' Huntington concludes that 'some of the problems in governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy...Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation in democracy.' ¶ '...The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. In the past, every democratic society has had a marginal population, of greater or lesser size, which has not actively participated in politics. In itself, this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic but it is also one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively. [Italics mine.]' ¶ With a candor which has shocked those trilateralists who are more accustomed to espousing the type of 'symbolic populism' Carter employed so effectively in his campaign, the Governability Report expressed the open secret that effective capitalist democracy is limited democracy! (See Alan Wolfe, 'Capitalism Shows Its Face.')

Serio famous quote and song lyrics... "I'm not a follower, I am the Leader. I'm not a student, I am the Teacher. I'm not a fellowship, I am the Preacher.

I get up in the morning every day because I want to read and see our voices on the page. I want to see them in libraries. I want to be writing stories about our community as a proud Chicano but also as a writer who has expertly crafted stories so that everybody will appreciate a different perspective. I want to show others that we have the ability to tell complex, innovative, even shockingly revolutionary stories that open people’s eyes.

In 1942 the government ordered the construction of a perimeter fence around the then-secret Site Y of the Manhattan Project. Consequently, they established an explicit border to distinguish the scientists and army personnel within the fence, atop the Hill, as “insiders,” and the communities outside the fence, below the Hill, as “outsiders.” As a result of the distinction between the Hill and the Valley, Los Alamos has become what Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1999) writes of the borderlands region of South Texas: a “place of contradictions” where “hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape” (19). The Hill-Valley binary is not simply geographic. Chicano literary scholar José David Saldívar (1997) says of topospatial readings such as this one that “the aim of these topospatial readings, it bears some repeating, is to show the profound interactions of space and history, geography and psychology, nationhood and imperialism, and to define space as not just a ‘setting’ but as a formative presence throughout” (79). The U.S. military deliberately constructed this institution, and it continues to overshadow northern New Mexico seventy-five years after the Manhattan Project was instituted on the Pajarito Plateau. The dichotomizing of the Hill and the Valley made objects of the people of New Mexico by enticing them away from land-based lifestyles with well-paying jobs in the nuclear industry, jobs that ultimately sickened, injured, and even killed them by contamination or explosion. In the chapter “Entering into the Serpent” from Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa (1999) claims that “in trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence” (59). Nuevomexicanas/os’ ascent up el camino de la culebra, the snake road, is a literal entering into the Anzaldúan serpent. This entering into the serpent is the catalyst for conocimiento, or a coming to consciousness.

The more established Latino communities—in East Los Angeles, for instance—had tried to keep their distance from the mayhem, giving rise to other anxieties and resentments. In the Los Angeles Times, a Chicano journalist wrote, “Yes, Central American immigrants and Chicanos might both be termed ‘Latino.’ But the ethnic link between the two groups is thin.” The article ran with the headline, “Should Latinos Support Curbs on Immigrants? A Question Left by the Riots Is Whether New Arrivals Threaten Second- and Third-Generation Mexican-Americans.

Let's start thinking in terms of feeding ourselves instead of feeding the grocery stores. Cooperatives are certainly a big answer for the people. Let's go back to being more self-sufficient. Why do we have to support Mr. Safeway, whoever or wherever he may be?

Today, Los Alamos and newspapers like The New Mexican are celebrating August 6. They call it "The 25th Anniversary of the Atomic City", or the birth of "The Atomic Age, but those are just fine words for a Day of Murder-for the single most horrible slaughter in human history. We cannot celebrate Murder with them. We will celebrate instead the awakening of ourselves and all the Sleeping Giants, rising up everywhere in the world to cry BASTA YA. Let the Manufacturers of Death celebrate the birth of their Atomic Age. We will celebrate the dawn of the People's Age. Power, at last, to the People! (1970)

A woman who has no way of expressing herself and realizing herself as a full human has nothing else to turn to but the owning of material things.

That we have scholars and Chicana PHDers of this caliber teaching in our educational institutions fulfills a vision of what we hoped would come out of the Chicano Movement. Even more extraordinary is the fact that most scholars do not forget “la causa Chicana,” thus watering the raices of the ancient past and living Chicano epic.

I learned to listen, not only to words, but to the hearts of people; thus capturing the passion, anger, outrage, and indignation when discussing racism, greed, repression and exploitation. These sentiments became an eruption of hundreds of years of repressed thought now set free.

I certainly embrace socialism. I can’t see any other solutions. This country [the United States] could feed the world if it wanted to.

How can one guarantee complete non-violence when one lives in a completely VIOLENT country?

Of all of my writings probably the article that created the biggest whoooraah turned out to be "The Woman of La Raza." This lost me friends and made me a target for the renowned "Malinche" label. But, like so many of my writings, the rewards were many and this article opened centuries-old flood gates that poured forth in women's words and thoughts. I knew "This is very important," and from this article came a whole women's history book, The Women of La Raza. This women's book begins to define the side of that mestizo face medallion we wore so proudly, La India. The Chicana/o Movement is a vital chapter of Southwestern history, a history needed to inspire new dreamers as activists become the elder generation. As we recall this chapter in Chicano history, we reseed the harvest of the Civil Rights Movement and cultivate the harvest of "La Revolución Chicana" remembering that our ancestors planted the first resisting seeds of non-defeat. This Revolución is the foundation of today's evolving issues, the metamorphosis of activism that makes all movements more important than ever. It will take more than thirty years to change 500 years of colonial racist exploitative attitudes, changes which only you can make possible as we live the sun of justice, The Sixth Sun.

As I look back I remember, "To think that at one time even my mother accused me of being a communist and threatened to report me to the government as such." I always respected her and had never answered her, but this time I answered: "Go ahead, I will call the FBI for you and you can turn me in. Who do you think I learned to be a revolutionary from? Remember when you would say: 'Si yo supiera hablar inglés, ¿ya me hubieran echado a la prisión?' Pues yo sí sé inglés, y ahora, justed me acusa de ser comunista? Ándele, entrégueme.""Her little eyes blinked and after a long silence we both laughed, hugged and cried as she said, "Hija de tu nana, me ganaste." I thought, "Of course, I won, what do you expect from the daughter of the Mexican Revolution?" Later, in 1968, I brought her to visit me in New Mexico and took her to hear Reies Tijerina when he spoke at Española High School. I will never forget the incredible look that came over her face as she drank up every word. After he finished, my mother walked right over to Reies, talked to him and hugged him, tearfully saying, "Nunca crei que oyera en este país las palabras y verdades que ha dicho usted." After we left, I smilingly hugged her and reminded her that now, she too was a communist. ¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN, SIEMPRE!

Looking at our history, I can see why this would be true. The role of the Chicana has been a very strong one, although a silent one. When the woman has seen the suffering of her people, she has always responded bravely and as a totally committed and equal human. My mother told me of how, during the time of Pancho Villa and the revolution in Mexico, she saw the men march through the village continually for three days and then she saw the battalion of women marching for a whole day. The women carried food and supplies; also, they were fully armed and wearing loaded "carrilleras." In battle, they fought alongside the men. Out of the Mexican revolution came the revolutionary personage "Adelita," who wore her rebozo crossed at the bosom as a symbol of a revolutionary woman in Mexico.

Then you will find the Chicana with a husband who was not able to fare so very well in the "Society" and perhaps has had to face defeat. She is the woman that really suffers. Quite often the man will not fight the real source of his problems, be it discrimination or whatever, but will instead come home and take it out on his family. As this continues, his Chicana becomes the victim of his machismo and woeful are the trials and tribulations of that household.

I didn’t want my kids to go through what I went through.

When we speak of Gringo, we do not particularly hate all white people, but we refer to their social system as ‘Gringo.’ That is what we don’t like.

Both Chicano and Puerto Rican activists continually stressed the importance of community control of local institutions, arguing that oppression and inequality would never end until Chicanos and Puerto Ricans controlled the institutions that directly affected community life.

The Puerto Rican movement of the 1960s and 1970s can be defined by its consistent calls for a radical transformation of U.S. society while simultaneously promoting the independence of Puerto Rico. Known as El Nuevo Despertar, this "New Awakening" of Puerto Rican radicalism was inspired and shaped by the growing militancy abroad and at home. Black Power, youth unrest (particularly against the Vietnam War), the War on Poverty, national liberation struggles in the Third World, Chicano and Native American militancy, gay and lesbian rights, and second-wave feminism are all part of the context that shaped the movement.

The movement's institutional legacy can also be seen in the realm of higher education: Chicano and Puerto Rican studies programs are the product of these movements and continue to play a key role in providing Latinos with a "civic education" that both politicizes and produces particular conceptions of Latino identity and subjectivity.