Transcription
[Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]
October 1966. A group of Mexican-Americans gathered to remind the United States of a long-forgotten promise, calling themselves the Alianza, the alliance. They met and claimed this federal land as their own, guaranteed by a treaty signed between the United States and Mexico. They arrested two United States forest rangers for trespassing.
“We’re taking full responsibilities,” the town of San—
“Just a second. Just a second. Yes, I know your laws already. We we’ve been citizens of the United States for 20 years and we know the law. We’re taking this upon our shoulders in the name of the town of San Chama.”
Ultimately, it was the leader of the Alianza who was arrested, Reies López Tijerina. But he planned to use the trial to argue that, according to a treaty signed by the United States, the people of Northern New Mexico legitimately own the [Music] land.
At one time, the land in New Mexico, along with California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, belonged to Mexico. In 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico. Two years later, the war was over, and Mexico had lost half its [Music] territory overnight. One hundred thousand Mexicans became foreigners on soil that had belonged to their families for generations. [Music] The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised these new Americans free enjoyment of their liberty and property of every [Music] kind.
“The land was sacred because your parents and grandparents were buried there. Some of your children were buried there, and you would be buried there. So the sweat, blood, and tears of generations have filtered into the land, so it is holy, it is sacred, sacral, saint.”
But the original land grants had been given under Spanish and Mexican law, which U.S. courts often did not recognize. Over the years, Mexican-Americans lost their land to speculators, lawyers, and cattle barons. Some property was taken by force, and the heirs to those land grants have resented that ever since. The Tierra Amarilla land grant was an immense land grant given to a certain Martinez from Los Lunas, New Mexico.
“And uh, I understand that the land grant was sold for $200, a team of horses, I don’t know how many pounds of flour or something like that, but only one of the heirs signed the deed. The other heirs didn’t, so they—the land grant was taken illegally.” [Music]
By 1960, millions of acres, including the Tierra Amarilla Grant, had been taken from the original land-owning [Music] families. Stepping into this long-simmering land dispute was Reies López Tijerina, born in Texas during the 1920s. He was the son of migrant workers. After a prophetic dream about injustice in New Mexico, Tijerina decided to learn treaty law. He was convinced that he could reclaim the Tierra Amarilla Grant.
“Although we are fighting for land, we are fighting for the survival and protection of our culture, to the extent that we feel that to rape the culture—”
Some who disagreed with Tijerina thought he was an opportunist looking for personal power.
“That’s just the way we will fight.”
“What you’re really saying, in effect, is that you own this land, you want everybody else to get off of it, or if they want to stay on it, to submit to your regulation?”
“No, to the regulations of the uh, town councils, which are covered and protected by the Constitution of New Mexico, Article 2, Section 5, and by—the Constitution of the United States, Article 12, Section 2, where it states that all the treaties made by the United States government are the supreme law of the land.” [Music]
The people of Northern New Mexico lived as tenants on land that once was [Music] theirs. In 1965, the Forest Service revoked half the grazing permits for small farmers, pushing them to the point of desperation. There was need for someone who could express their frustration. When a former fundamentalist preacher came along, he sounded like the Messiah himself.
“We are now waiting an answer from the state department to claim what belongs to us.”
He was speaking the magic words. The issue, the struggle, had been alive for all these generations, and here was a man—a man on a white horse, a man with tremendous charisma who plugged into a deep-felt passion—more than a feeling of passion—and he turned the spirits on.
Tijerina’s mission brought him face to face with Northern New Mexico’s district attorney, Alonso Sanchez.
“At that point is where he started saying that the object of his corporation was uh, to take over properties that uh, uh, the Alianza claims belongs to them by force if necessary, blah blah blah, and and I looked at him straight in the eye and I said, ‘Reies, if you intend to do what you tell me that this corporation’s going to do, it is illegal, and right now I’m telling you that if you do what you say you’re going to do, I’m the one that’s going to stop you.’”
In the spring of 1967, Tijerina faced federal charges for his role in the occupation of Carson National Forest. Tensions in Northern New Mexico were escalating. Forest Service fences were cut. Haystacks and barns were torched. The Alianza was blamed.
“I think that the uh, the action of Tijerina is matched by an equally violent reaction. For instance, I’ve had several ranchers come into my office and swear that they’re going to kill someone.”
When Tijerina announced plans for a meeting to plot the Alianza’s next move, Sanchez was convinced the group was preparing a showdown to reclaim the land. The district attorney decided to stop the meeting.
“I explained, ‘If you meet and your object is to plan how you’re going to take over property that doesn’t belong to you, the Alianza or Tijerina or anybody other than the rightful owners, then it is an unlawful assembly, and I will prosecute you and file criminal charges against each one of you.’ If later on it turns out that that’s what you’re going to do, so with excuses that we were Communists and trying to take over the land, he confiscated uh, uh, files and blocked the roads and and threatened the people—anybody going to that convention would be arrested.”
This was getting out of hand. What if the Tijerina were just a little bit successful? There were land grants all over New Mexico, and I think it was a real economic threat. Sanchez called for the arrest of Alianza leaders, but Tijerina got away. Those who were arrested would face charges at a hearing to be held the following Monday, June 5th, at Tierra Amarilla. It would be a day long remembered by New Mexicans.
“We don’t believe in violence, but we believe in Jesus Christ, who used a whip—a whip to drive out the false preachers out of the temple, and I think that’s all we did in the courthouse of Tierra Amarilla. We just used a little—”
Tijerina and a group of armed men stormed the courthouse. They were there, they said, to make a citizen’s arrest of District Attorney Sanchez for violating their right to assembly. When gunfire began, Sheriff Benny Nango was inside the courthouse.
“My jailer ran into the hallway and he says, ‘Get the hell out of here, Benny, get out of here,’ and he jumped out the window. Then they shot him outside the window, and I went to the window and they started shooting at me, and then they started shooting at me through the door off the hallway, so I laid down on the floor, but I heard him—that they kept saying Reies said not to hurt nobody, that all we want is Alonso Sanchez.”
Sanchez was nowhere to be found.
“Had I been there, I guess those 100 bullet holes, I wouldn’t be here.”
A state patrolman and the jailer were shot and seriously wounded. Two others, a reporter and a deputy sheriff, were held captive all [Music] afternoon.
“My understanding is that Reies had tried to kind of calm down the the uh, what turned to be an assault, and he wasn’t able to because what he did, he just uh, offered a vision to some people who were ready to fight.”
The governor’s office called in the National Guard. Revolution, it seemed, had come to Northern New Mexico.
“It was like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa were alive again and they had gone and had claimed their land again. It was like wildfire in the movement when we heard about it. We heard it like that among Chicano people. There was kind of a victorious sense that finally, you know, our cause is out in the open and finally maybe we can galvanize the nation, such as the African-American movement has done.”
Some Mexican-Americans were alarmed by the violence that had taken place, but Tijerina’s actions fired the imagination of movement activists and inspired a corrido, a traditional ballad commemorating the [Music] event. June 5th, 1967. That [Music] and after 10 days on the run, Tijerina turned himself in. He now faced state criminal [Music] [Applause] [Music] charges.
Out of this whole movement was emerging the feeling:
“We had—this used to be Mexico, this used to be our land, but it was uh, it was a growing sense of of uh, of a people and a collective history of struggle against an invasion and occupation and takeover and everything like that uh, and I think that had uh, that had a lot to do with [Music] it.”
The struggle for land inspired Urban Chávez, who believed the United States conquest of the Southwest had turned them into second-class citizens.
“Certain things you knew—stores you shouldn’t shop in, movie theaters you probably best not go to—and still the synonymous sense that the word Mexican went with the word dirty. I remember as a child people feeling that the best thing they could say to me was, ‘Well, you’re a Spanish girl, aren’t you?’ and I’d say, ‘No, I’m Mexican.’ I hated being Mexican. There was no respect, there was no no status, there was no participation in the society. My father not speaking good English was an embarrassment when I would go to school as a child. Now these were things that I wasn’t able to intellectualize; these were things that I felt—we were walking around with a tremendous burden of being Mexican in a country that didn’t want us except as labor. This is something that I’ll never forget and I’ll never get it because this was the evening that I asked my wife to marry.”
Edward Roybal, one of the first Mexican-Americans elected to Congress, experienced discrimination firsthand.
“And the policeman lined us all up—about 14 couples—made us put our hands up over our heads and they went through our pockets. Then they asked each one of us to show credentials. I gave them my wallet, and after they looked at it, this policeman started to take my cards out of my wallet and drop them to the sidewalk, and then after he did that, he said, ‘Now you pick them up.’ I remember getting on my knees and picking them up. This is something, of course, that uh, a man that just asked uh, his best girl to marry him will not [Music] forget.”
Our parents consciously chose not to share their experiences with us, their bitter, discriminatory experiences. [Music] They thought that it would embitter us, that it would create um uh, sort of a hatred within us that they wanted to prevent and protect us [Music] from.
Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. President Lyndon Johnson, a Texan elected with broad Mexican-American support in 1964, was already under pressure from the Mexican-American community. The courthouse raid dramatized the growing unrest among Mexican [Music] Americans. The legacy of poverty and discrimination was abundantly [Music] clear. Half of all Mexican-Americans had less than 8 years of education, and a third lived in poverty. Politically, they were underrepresented. In 1967, only four Mexican-Americans served in Congress.
“Spanish-speaking people, I think, need to get closer to their government and to get action from their government.”
And get—Johnson responded by creating a Cabinet Committee on Mexican-American Affairs for help in solving their very special, unique problems.
“I named this—sent to Himes to the chairmanship of the committee, and that message came to me too that, ‘Hey, you’ve got to do something because here’s this young radical group out there, they’ve got something on their minds, and I happen to believe that they’re right.’ Establishment—you got to do something and say to them, ‘Look, when you come to that particular area, you must remember that here is a—we walk this path to get to where we want to go. Some of the others wanted to walk another path to get to where they wanted to go, but the way we wanted to go was the same place—we wanted equality, we wanted first-class citizenship, we wanted to be respected, we wanted our children to have better schools—all that everybody else wants, you know. We’re telling them that we discovered this country on this side.”
But the Cabinet Committee was not enough. We’re telling them already—new voices were demanding to be heard. In 1967, Corky González expressed the feelings and desires of young Chicanos in an epic poem:
“I am Wám. I am Hákchin. Lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the world of a gringo society. I am the masses of my people, and I refuse to be absorbed. I am Chicanito. Chicanito is a life of all of our people. He is one of us and is all of us. The odds are great, but my spirit is strong, my faith unbreakable, my blood is pure. I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ. I shall endure. I will endure. And now the trumpet sounds, the music of the people stirs.”
For Chicanos, “I Am Wám” was a spiritual and cultural revelation. It was the history they had never learned in school. It was a celebration of their Indian and Spanish ancestry, of their Mexican heroes and American [Music] lives.
“It’s the experience that was so moving because it was such a strong poem, you know, and yet it called you to action, you know, and I identified greatly with it. Corky gave soul and spirit—gave it the the real spirit of what was Chicano nationalism, which was very positive. If there was an ideology out there, Corky was very much the driving force. Well, I—once you teach a man who he is and you give him pride in himself, you give him the spirit to stand up. There’s no society can exist—growing up in the barrios of Denver, Corky González boxed his way out of poverty. At one time, he was the third-ranked world featherweight contender. Later he went into business selling bonds and insurance. He also turned to Democratic Party politics. In 1960, he registered unprecedented numbers of Mexican-Americans to vote for John F. Kennedy. Corky’s motive for becoming involved in the Democratic party was to bring about the changes that he wanted to see within the Chicano—within the Mexican community at large. As director of Denver’s War on Poverty program, he encountered a patronage system that offered little more than token jobs to Mexican-Americans. After a public feud with the Denver mayor, González broke with the Democratic Party in 1966 and began a civil rights organization called The Crusade for Justice. He envisioned a Chicano enterprise independent of government involvement. As long as we’re not antagonized, nor are the young people antagonized by people who do show no respect for them, we as an organization were a nationalist organization, which means we put our priority on our community. We felt if Mexicans didn’t stick up for Mexicans, no one else was going to. Our kids are just as smart as anybody else’s kids, given the opportunities, and we wouldn’t be fighting so hard if our parents before us would have done what we’re doing for our children. And they say, ‘Well, this is the way it is, you have to accept it.’ We found out we don’t have to accept it, and our kids are not going to—we’re not going to settle for this for our kids. We’re going to work with them and teach them our new way of life, which is our right.”
Corky was a hell of an organizer.
“You know, I mean, this this is a guy who who was really making things happen in Denver. I mean, there was a full-fledged community organization that was very sophisticated for its time operating out of Denver, Colorado, and it was all centered around this guy called Corky González, you know, who was one of us.”
Corky González would soon gain national attention for Chicanos.
“We spend in the so-called War on Poverty in America only about $53 for each person classified as poor.”
Dr. Martin Luther King had made great strides obtaining civil rights for Black people. Now he wanted to address poverty with a multi-racial coalition. King was planning a Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., during the spring of 1968. He hoped to unite Americans of all colors under one banner to join in a common fight against poverty. Dr. King invited Corky González and Tijerina to be part of that coalition. Only a few weeks before the campaign took place, King was assassinated.
“Where are we going? We’re going to try to fulfill Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream, and if we Mexican-Americans march to Washington, it is to tell this country that poverty is not a Negro problem; it is a Mexican-American poverty; it is an American Indian poverty; it is a Puerto Rican poverty; it is an Appalachian [Applause] problem.”
There were several busloads of people from Northern New Mexico villages um and small towns that were going to go—some people who had never been out of the state before. It was really something. Seizing the opportunity—some Chicanos gave voice to the frustrations of their people.
“Everybody seemed to be taking advantage of us, you know, our our our our Mexican-American uh, brothers and and fathers are the ones that go fight in Vietnam, and then when they come back they have no jobs, they have nothing here to come back to.”
Tijerina and Corky González were leaders for the Southwest contingent of the Poor People’s Campaign.
“The newspapers is speaking nothing but jobs, jobs, jobs. He doesn’t mention land. He doesn’t mention treaties.”
He had interviewed the campaign as a means of bringing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and his land struggle to Washington’s attention.
“I would like to state that uh, the Mexican-Americans from the Southwest have come here in support of the Poor People’s Campaign to be part of the Poor People’s Campaign.”
González saw a larger objective. He and his followers wanted to create alliances and draw national attention to Chicano issues. But the Poor People’s Campaign revealed differences between the participating groups. Without Dr. King’s leadership, the campaign was soon floundering. Chicanos became increasingly impatient with the campaign’s lack of progress.
“Our rights as Spanish-Americans and the Indian rights and the poor people—poor whites are not being represented rightfully.”
“I would like to say that there there is no uh, division in our ranks whatsoever.”
Reverend Ralph Abernathy, director of the Poor People’s Campaign, tried to resolve the conflict without success. Chicano leaders began setting their own agenda together.
“It’s the Maná versus the Supreme Court of the United States. It’s the Indian people and 16,000 at the Supreme Court.”
Tijerina called for the recognition of Indian rights.
“So we are happy that we made history today, ladies and gentlemen, of Resurrection City. For nine years, Mr. Attorney General, under the—we have three more things and then I’ll be with—at the Justice Department.”
Corky González grew impatient with Administration rhetoric. González challenged Attorney General Ramsey Clark:
“When you say there might be discrimination in housing, then that means that you are either naive or blind. I didn’t hear you say anything about the juvenile court—kangaroo court—that subjects our children to controls by people who don’t care any more about them that except to advise them to go into the U.S. Army or the Navy or Marines.”
Corky González was emerging as the leading Chicano voice.
“Personality-wise, Corky understood the the the workings of the politics. He was skilled in that. Reies was so single-minded around his issues that I think it was difficult for him to swim in that atmosphere. Reies was not an organizer; he was a leader. Corky was a person who could both organize and lead.”
Six weeks after it began, the Poor People’s Campaign came to an end. It fell victim to its own internal troubles and to a Johnson Administration that had become preoccupied with the war in Vietnam to the detriment of domestic poverty [Music] issues. Still, many Chicanos viewed their participation as a success.
“When issues of civil rights were discussed, you started seeing that the Mexican-American community was mentioned if not included, and we felt that we did attain that one goal—that we gained national visibility for a group that previously had been considered an invisible minority.”
Soon after returning to New Mexico, Tijerina began a two-year prison sentence for his role in the takeover of the Carson National Forest.
“Because there is nothing but races—let’s face it—you have to understand that they thought that we couldn’t march in Denver.”
Corky González and other leaders announced it was time for Chicanos to meet independently and on their own.
“We came here to build the new Chicano movement; that’s what we came here [Music] for.”
The first Chicano Youth Conference was to take place at Denver in March of 1969. [Music] Chicanos everywhere were invited: students, teachers, laborers, barrio youth. The coming event attracted considerable attention, not all of it desired. FBI files on the Crusade for Justice showed that that very proposal to convene a national gathering of Latino activists immediately drew the concern of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
“At that particular point in time, we assumed that we were under surveillance, but we had not yet become paranoid.”
The arrest, the persecution, and the attempt to destroy the movement through legal means had not yet taken full hold. The FBI predicted a poor showing, but the Los Angeles Times expected otherwise and sent veteran reporter Ruben Salazar to cover the event. [Applause] More than a thousand came to the meeting—three times the Crusade's initial [Applause] estimate. That was my first encounter with Texans, Coloradans, New Mexicans, and Arizonians, and they were all Mexicans. And then they were Mexicans from Chicago, New York, Kansas. I didn't know there were Mexicans in Kansas. So, uh, this was one of the main purposes: to relate the farm worker struggle, the land struggle, the urban struggle. And in doing that, we forgot a lot about the urban problems. Corky Gonzalez hoped to adopt the plan of action; it would be a nationalist blueprint for self-determination, emphasizing separate Chicano institutions, community-controlled schools, an independent political party, and cultural [Music] affirmation. Every single session would be open with a poem or a song. There were dances, there was theater; it was rich, it was stimulating, it was alive and vibrant. The building was just pulsating with energy and music and chants and excitement of all these young people together. It was very positive.
The thing I remember most, however, is this workshop, uh, a women's workshop, um, where, oh, I guess maybe 50–70 women together. CH [Music] Of the women began questioning their roles in the Chicano [Music] movement. There was a sort of some thinking among some of the leadership that women belonged behind the men, walking behind the men, and their total role was to do nothing but support the men. And there were others who said, "Hell no! You know, we're the ones who keep it together. We keep it together in our community; we keep it together in our homes, and uh, we're not walking behind nobody." On the one hand, women were doing the work; they were often in leadership; they had a lot of the ideas. And at the same time, they were often consistently expected to make the food and and to do typing, clerical kinds of work. This debate took the male organizers of the conference by surprise. We didn't know what they were talking about or why they felt that way. So, due to the pressure of the women, the agendas were changed; meeting places were set; panels were set up; and women had their voice, whether or not the men liked it. The women's caucus agreed to press for equality within all aspects of the movement, but rejected a separate organization for Chicana feminists. Most of us—I'll say the majority—were not at the point of, um, defining ourselves separately in the Chicano movement. There was not a formal position taken, just that it should be understood that women and men would be equal, especially since we were fighting for equality and for an end to [Music] racism. That was as much a rejection of the women's liberation movement of those years, which was seen as—and in many ways was—overwhelmingly middle class and and Anglo women, white women who did not understand racist oppression, did not understand the oppression of whole people, half of whom are male.
In other discussions, some of them very heated, activists debated Marxism and nationalism, but reaffirmed a Chicano identity rooted in ancient Aztec myths. We didn't want to be assimilated into some melting pot notion in which we had to sacrifice everything and the dominant society just, uh, swallowed us up into some, um, sense of a new American, and we had to give up who we were. We wanted to define ourselves on our [Music] terms. At night, Alurista, a young poet, was hard at work, drawing upon Aztec folklore. He drafted a new mythology for Chicanos, describing a symbolic Chicano Homeland within the borders of the United States. I presented it the next day as a poem, as a poem that I thought encapsulated the spirit of the moment. I never planned anything else. I said, "May I read you a poem before the world, before all of North America, before all of our brothers in the bronze continent." We are a nation; we are a union of free pueblos; we are Aztlán. According to legend, the Aztec people had migrated from a place called Aztlán to Central Mexico. For Chicanos, Aztlán came to mean the Southwestern United States, their Homeland. It was a calling; it was almost like a declaration for us and a calling to say, "You know, we are Aztlán; we are a brown people; we're we're a nation." I think of Aztlán still to this day as perhaps the most important premise of the entire movement. It was about a state of being and a place. Every people have a place, and so to say you were Chicano without a place is impossible. So the place was Aztlán. [Music] Aztlán became a call for political power, a call heard when over a thousand Chicanos marched out of conference headquarters to the state capital. There they lowered the Colorado State banner and raised the Mexican flag. With our hearts in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our Meso-nation. To outsiders, it looked like Chicanos were turning their back on America. To Chicanos, it meant they were here to [Music] stay. It meant we were home. It meant this was our historic land. It meant this is where we were from. It meant we weren't foreigners. It meant we weren't wetbacks. It meant we weren't illegal aliens. It meant we were in our ancestral land. We had been educated under mythologies and myths that basically emanated and came out of the American experience, you know, whatever you had, you know what is Manifest Destiny or the cherry tree or whatever, whatever myths, you know, energize your culture, uh, we now had something—the myth of Aztlán—it connected us all. [Music]
The conference adopted Alurista's poem as the preamble to its 15-point plan. The next step was to make Aztlán [Music] a reality. Within a year, the movement was poised to launch an independent political party. The kickoff would coincide with the demonstration against Chicano casualties in [Music] Vietnam. And war demonstrators protested US involvement in the Vietnam War in mass marches, rallies, and demonstrations. Central Park is the starting point for the parade to the UN building. President Richard Nixon came to office in 1968 promising to reduce American troops in [Applause] Vietnam. Instead, he widened the war. Opposition to Vietnam was taking hold in the Chicano community. We had reached the point where we were going to say that, "Hey, we don't have to prove ourselves, uh, feel an inferiority complex, and and go out and serve in that war." We're protesting against the discriminatory draft laws that give deference to all the Anglo people of this country and make the heaviest burden of the war fall on the poor people. We were becoming expert at getting out of the war, you know, and and so as more and more and more middle-class people, people that could afford lawyers, began to get deferments, uh, the draft boards filled up their quotas with more of the poor, and particularly Mexican-American. Mexican-American casualties were disproportionate to their numbers in the Southwest. Mexican-Americans made up 12% of the population but accounted for almost 20% of the region's deaths in Vietnam, according to many sources. There was some dissent in our community about whether or not we should be protesting against the war, but it was generally a generational division. Young people were pretty much against it; students were almost completely all against it. At the same time, I have to say that there was a very strong military tradition in our community. Mexican-Americans had served with distinction in the US military since the Civil War and during World Wars I and II, receiving the highest military honors. So there was—and is—a deep respect for the military in our community because it was one of the gateways, one of the paths that people took to gain an education, to gain some sort of self-respect. The problem was that the only places where we could go forth and claim a part of being American in this country was by spilling our blood, and the fatality rate is not consistent with the fact that we have so many inconsistencies as far as social problems here in our in in Los Angeles and our own nation, our own country. If you were asked to risk to die for something, what is it you believe in, and what do you owe to that country? You know, why should we fight over there when our main battle is over here right now? This is Our Land. This Is Our Land. It's easy for the establishment to say, "Aren't we all the same? Aren't we all Americans?" Well, obviously we're not; otherwise, we won't be in the revolutionary process that we are in now.
What, in your estimation, is the most serious problem? Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar had been following the Chicano movement ever since the Denver youth conference. Chicanos, in turn, were coming to respect his frank commentary, and when he goes in the Army, he goes to Salazar. Now joined Chicanos in vocal opposition to the war. Many of us are quite grateful that I, for one, probably would never have gone to college if I had not been in the Army, thanks to the GI Bill. But, uh, the fact remains that, uh, we seem to, uh, to lose more of our people, uh, in Vietnam in proportion to the rest of the population. A Chicano moratorium committee was formed to build momentum against the war. The idea came up, "Why don't we have a national meeting and start developing how we nationally do something against the war? So let's have our own Chicano moratorium." They held anti-war rallies in Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, and Houston, with a major demonstration slated for Los Angeles in August 1970, a moratorium march. Afterwards, Corky Gonzalez and others hoped to convene the first meeting of an all-Chicano political party. In many ways, the moratorium march was the apex of the Chicano movement [Music], and it was a moment in which we all felt that we had to speak and that the war was the single most important issue that was confronting the country at the [Music] time. On August 29th, 25,000 to 30,000 Chicanos gathered in Los Angeles to protest the war in Vietnam. [Music] There was a couple getting married at the St. Alphonsus Church; they timed their wedding so they could come right out of the, right out of the church into the march. Ruben Salazar was there, and he came up right in the middle of, right of, within, in the middle of the street. Gave me a big hug. "Well, you did it!" [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]
After a 4 1/2-mile march, the demonstrators gathered at Laguna [Music] Park. Everybody was there, greeting their friends, greeting their families, people that they met, relatives they may not have seen in a long time that they happened to see. August 29th, during the afternoon rally, a disturbance erupted at a local liquor store. According to the police story, uh, some people went into a liquor store and walked out with some six-packs and went towards the park, and the, the supposedly the shop called into the police. The police came and started chasing the people that supposedly took the beer, and the people ran into the park, and then the police wanted to go get them, but the people in the park wouldn't move out of the way, so they had to call more police and declared an illegal assembly. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] That was their pretext that they used, you know, uh, to break up a demonstration of 25,000–30,000 people against the war in Vietnam and in East LA. So you had a panic, you know, you had a stampede, a human stampede. [Music] [Music] [Applause] Uh, a lot of destruction took place on both sides. The police called it a Chicano riot; the people called it a police riot. Demonstrators found refuge in nearby homes or in local businesses as police forced people out of the park and into the streets. I was in the, uh, the restroom with, with little children that were there. They were very scared; they were crying. The mother was, was had never seen such a [Music] thing. Deputy Sheriff Thomas Wilson responded to a report that an armed person was in the Silver Dollar Bar on Whittier Boulevard. "When I approached the doorway, I knew I had a tear gas projectile and the weapon. I wanted to get something inside, and I wanted to get it inside quick. I attempted to aim up towards the ceiling to bounce the projectile to the rear of the bar. Some people inside never heard the orders to come out; among them, Ruben Salazar. Sometime later, after the gas cleared, uh, information was received that the, uh, victim, Mr. Salazar, was inside the location had been injured. The officers investigated, and they found that he, uh, was dead and, uh, was lying approximately 20 to 25 feet inside the front door." And it is your opinion the deputy sheriff's tear gas canister hit Salazar in the head, killing him. "If it was an accident, it happened because the lives of Mexican people were considered worthless, so that you could fire a huge tear gas projectile into a bar, as a public place, and not worry about it." It happened; it took off Salazar's head. Chicanos mourned the loss of a friend and their own only ally in the mainstream [Music] media. The death of Ruben Salazar had a profound impact on the Chicano [Music] movement. I think that the sheriff's, you know, the point that for the Chicanos the war is more here in the struggle for justice than over in Vietnam. We had considered the possibility of violence, being that there were so many people, um, but not certainly not deaths. 200 people were arrested; 60 were wounded; three died. And plans to create an all-Chicano political party were [Music] postponed. We'd lost a certain heart; we lost a certain innocence of our ideals that we could engage the country through the country's own ideals of the Bill of Rights, the ideals that the country was supposedly founded on, and that we could be killed—people, all people who are struggling for more social justice, uh, it's it's a long struggle, but there are traditions that get set, their concepts that get established, there's visions that get put out, there's dreams that get dreamed, and just having those in our in our in our lives and in our minds is is a victory in itself.