Chicano Moratoriums: The East Los Angeles-Ventura County Connection

It was on its way to being a completely wonderful Saturday. August 29, 1970.

People from barrio communities and ag towns throughout the West—Denver, Colorado; San Antonio, Texas; Seattle, Washington to nearby cities in Ventura County like Oxnard and Santa Paula—journeyed to East Los Angeles to participate in another Chicano Moratorium, of a scheduled series, demanding the end to the US war in Vietnam.

(National Chicano Moratorium march down Whittier Blvd. in East Los Angeles, August 29, 1970. Source: Los Angeles Public Library)

Ethnic Mexican sons, brothers, boyfriends, and husbands had died there disproportionately (20 percent) to their number in the Southwest (14 percent), stated a 1968 report by political scientist Ralph Guzman.

But this was just one data point of a web of racist-classist oppressions that ethnic Mexicans in the US endured. Like the true believers who followed César Chávez from Delano, California to Sacramento in 1966 to shed public light on the farming industry’s exploitation of workers and the students who walked out of East Los Angeles high schools with moxie in 1968 to demand an equal education, politicized ethnic Mexicans and their allies that summer day similarly took over streets to also demand an end to incessant police brutality in their communities and a school pushout rate that exceeded 50 percent making youth particularly susceptible to the draft and lowered life chances.

Furthermore, demonstrators, many of whom embraced the Chicana/o epithet, viewed the event as more than a protest. It was also a parade celebrating the splendor of their culture by way of comity, song, and dance.

To support the petition of grievances of their daughters and sons, parents attended the event with their younger offspring in tow.

La Raza (the hoi polloi) came alive with bilingual chants. As the pageant from Belvedere Park down Whittier Boulevard concluded at Laguna Park (later renamed Salazar Park), families rested in front of a stage to heed militant speeches and delight conjunto music as grade school-aged girls danced wearing colorful folclórico dresses and coiffed hair with matching ribbons.

As educator Sal Castro lachrymosely declared after the student walkouts two years before, it was a beautiful day to be a Chicano!

Then Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies violated the convivencia as they pursued liquor store robbery suspects. At the park they found themselves pelted with bottles and rocks—not an unusual scene in communities that regularly suffered indignities and the lethal abuse of law enforcement. Witness Maria del Socorro Urias Muñoz, mother of Rosalio Muñoz, chairman of the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, commented decades later, “The sheriff had no business coming into that park.”

But Chicano resistance would not be allowed to pass unrequited. So, the embattled deputies called in backup. After which, they stormed the park mercilessly rocking people with their batons and teargassing men, women, children, the elderly, and even a wheelchair-bound person.

Consequently, over one hundred were arrested, many wounded, and three persons would die: Lyn Ward, Angel Gilberto Díaz, and Ruben Salazar, the martyred Los Angeles Times columnist and KMEX news director considered by fans as the intrepid voice of the ethnic Mexican community.

Not to be intimidated, the NCMC and autonomous like-groups such as one in Oxnard vowed to move forward with their planned demonstrations to maintain and expand the power of their movement.

In fact, the stomping of Chicano activism on August 29th galvanized El Movimiento. Hunter S. Thompson shrewdly contended in Rolling Stone Magazine the next year that the homicide of Salazar by deputy sheriff Thomas Wilson at the Silver Dollar bar after the disruption of the peaceful assembly at Laguna Park transformed conformist ethnic Mexicans. He wrote, “Middle-aged housewives who had never thought of themselves as anything but lame-status ‘Mexican Americans’ just trying to get by in a mean Gringo world they never made suddenly found themselves shouting ‘Viva La Raza’ in public. And their husbands—quiet Safeway clerks and lawn-care salesmen, the lowest and most expendable cadres in the Great Gabacho economic machine—were…[now] calling themselves Chicanos.”

(Oxnard La Raza Moratorium, September 19, 1970, demonstration flyer. Created by Alberto Ordoñez. Source flickr.com)

Three weeks after the tragedy at Laguna Park a Chicano Moratorium demonstration billed emphatically as a peace march took place in Oxnard on September 19. An estimated one to three thousand marchers from all walks of life, places, and a span of generations came together to again claim the streets. From La Virgin de Guadalupe Church, demonstrators paraded through La Colonia, the city’s version of East LA, and the downtown district with a coffin representing ethnic Mexican servicemen killed in Vietnam.

Former Brown Beret Peggy Larios of the city of Ventura recalled elders of her community defiantly marching with her. Hence, for this moment, no matter their generational designation and citizenship, they were all Chicanas and Chicanos.

The procession concluded at the Oxnard Community Center with poetry, music, dance, and speeches. Rosalio Muñoz spoke characterizing the war as the “systematic murder” of Chicanos.

(Rosalio Muñoz speaking, Ventura Star-Free Press, Septemper 20, 1970)

Before the peace march, men and women of the Oxnard Brown Berets leafleted Ventura County neighborhoods. Roberto Flores, a UCLA classmate of Muñoz, and other organizers trained monitors to avoid a catastrophe such as had occurred on August 29th. To this end, the Berets and MEChA students from the community colleges of Moorpark and Ventura as well as high school youth conferred with Oxnard Police Department chief Robert Owen and circulated a code of conduct to the media.

The Moratorium Committee’s dialogue with law enforcement and a public relations campaign garnered goodwill in the community. Indeed, the Oxnard Press-Courier commended the organizers in an editorial, in which it acknowledged the disproportionate ethnic Mexican casualty rate. It also praised, in a backhanded manner, the police for its “diplomacy and restraint” leading up to and during the march.

Chicano Moratorium commemorations continue today in communities in and out of East Los Angeles as they mark a history that centers on the experience of ethnic Mexican and Latinx peoples in the US to inspire and reinspire the young and old, respectively, to continue their struggle to realize the ideal of justice for all.

C/S
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TROPICS OF META, HISTORY NEWS NETWORK,

An Encomium for Carmen

 At the close of Teatro Campesino’s 1972 film “Los Vendidos/The Sellouts,” originally a play written by Luis Valdez, a menagerie of stereotyped ethnic Mexicans — e.g., an “esa” and a pachuco cruising in a classic 1950s-era Fleetline, a Frito Bandito-like Mexican revolutionary, a monolingual Spanish-speaking housewife who serves her viejo Kool-Aid, campus militants, and a Spanish conquistador — gather around Luis’s character, a somnolent “Mexican peon.”

Before the final scene, Ms. Jimenez (who stressed her Anglicized surname as “Ms. Gym-eh-Nez,” as opposed to “Hee-meh-nez”), a factotum from the governor’s office, presumably of California, procured a Chicano, named Eric (not Kiki, the endearing cognomen used by his peers) whose assignment was to masquerade as a business attired, college-educated, fluently bilingual, “made in the U.S.A,” Mexican-American. 

After attaining the attention of the cast, who moaned and stretched from their fixed poses, Luis lays out a map on the floor of Honest Sanchos Used Mexican Shop. Then he pointed out, “We got Chicanos infiltrated in every urban center in the U.S.: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, New York, Washington, Rumford, Maine.” 

Yes. Even in Rumford, Maine! 

For me, Ventura County Supervisor Carmen Ramirez was such a Chicana who had infiltrated the power structure of landed dynastic families and capitalist interests to fight on behalf of our community — ethnic Mexicans and other historically underserved peoples that included lumpen proletariat, poor whites — on various boards, councils, and bodies dominated by male and female Anglos.

As an educator succinctly memorialized on social media, Carmen was “our champion” as we knew she was watching out for us — La Raza/the people. 

As the daughter of a WWII US Army veteran, our querida Carmen grew up in the East Los Angeles community of Pico Rivera and came of age during the fervor of El Movimiento Chicana/o. She navigated circles of renowned groups and figures of that time. One included Oscar Zeta Acosta (aka the Brown Buffalo); the once assimilated, self-loathing Mexican American who worked as a legal-aid attorney in Los Angeles only to find himself caught up in the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and ’70s. 

Carmen also was well connected to civil rights activists like Alice Greenfield McGrath, the once executive secretary of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee as well as United Farm Workers movement organizers, ascending and arrived politicians, and the intelligentsia. 

After her education at Cal State LA, Carmen was admitted to Loyola Law School after Acosta, Los Católicos Por La Raza, and Chicana/o regulars jammed up Cardinal James McIntyre and the archdiocese in 1969 for its hubristic institutional neglect of the needs of the ethnic Mexican community. Carmen understood that the militantly-righteous trouble of El Movimiento had busted open doors to improve the life chances of los de abajo, the hoi polloi, of our society and that she was one of its beneficiaries.

Hence, she paid forward this obligation with sophistication as a citizen-professional in solidarity with her community. 

As a politician, however, Carmen did not publicly pronounce her Chicana identity as it would have been unwise to do so. But her friends knew she was a nueva Chicana as she cunningly demonstrated, without fail, a commitment to advancing the interest of the underdogs. As I write, I am reminded of her fierce defense of her people as a private citizen and elected official against gas, electric, and oil companies who dared not contaminate or compromise the safety of more affluent, whiter communities with their ventures, but for them poor, predominantly brown areas were open game. 

And knowing that education was a weighty mace against such injustice, over the past twenty years Carmen committed herself to California State University Channel Islands’ development, even before the appointment of its earliest tenure-track faculty starting in 2001.  

I got to know Carmen when she was a member of the university’s community advisory committee. As she did as an Oxnard councilmember, Mayor Pro Tem, and county supervisor, she made certain, in her signature diplomatic yet powerfully measured manner that Ventura County’s only public university would have a faculty, curriculum, and programs that equitably served and reflected the interests of the demographic makeup of its service area. 

For example, in 2005, when presumptuous functionaries of CSU Channel Islands decided to strike the BA degree in Chicana/o Studies from its academic master plan, Carmen attended a campus conversation of administrators, students, staff, and faculty. After listening to the views in support of Chicana/o Studies and others for a milquetoast multicultural program, Carmen spoke.

With a poetic equanimity, she asked, as a CSU alum, why this was an issue when just about every campus in the system had Chicana/o Studies. This was a huge intervention that aided Chicana/o Studies' ultimate institution. 

Later, Carmen would attend events of CSU Channel Islands’ Chicana/o Studies Department: an open house, exhibits, lectures, and ceremonies. From afar, I often viewed her classically warm smile as she basked in the glory of the history and culture of her community. 

Thank you, Carmen, for being a Chicana infiltrator in many positions of power.

C/S

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VC STAR,