La Raza Newspaper and Chicano Movement

La Raza was a newspaper in East Los Angeles. It was the paper that recorded the demonstrations and the organizing, talked about the meetings that occurred, and also talked about the issues of concern to the East L.A. Chicano community. You had a movement that was taking place amongst a broad community that La Raza as a publication was a part of and was reporting on and giving coverage that they would never have gotten otherwise because mainstream media... was limited and was not interested in the subject. A lot of us wanted to bring out the truth of who we were. We wanted to come out with our own news, with our own version, with our own story. La Raza newspaper was one of the key instruments, tools that we used to then communicate our ideology of chicanismo, the equivalent to what is today Facebook and Twitter. That's how we got the message out. La Raza was not... Composed basically of brown people. Deborah Weber was white, but she was more Chicana than more Chicano. In the late 60s and early 70s, I was a young 21-year-old, 22-year-old. I was passionate, excited about things, involved with things, curious and enthusiastic. Gil Lopez and Patricia Borjón were of Native American ancestry. Probably one of the most enlightening experiences I had at La Raza was becoming a photographer. We contributed and educated one another on those specific skills that possibly we had that others didn't. For instance, Manuel Barrera. He was so instrumental in educating me about photography, about developing film. Raul Ruiz was more of the political side. He knew about the powers that be and how government worked. and what issues we should key in on for our community. Maria Marcos Sanchez, single mom, a very, very dedicated young woman. Maria worked in every single aspect of La Raza. I started on a 35mm Nikon. Luis Garza, Luis Garza was a photographer at the magazine at the time. He mentored me as far as developing the film and using the camera. It was a mix of... Personalities and talents of ages, of gender. Some were parents, some were students. The amount of energy and talent, both professional and raw, was really eclectic. Everybody was dedicated to telling the story. Joe Rossa was ever the lawyer, always keeping us on the straight and narrow. There were some people that were primarily photographers. I was a contributor. I was not part of the decision-making or the, as they say, their board of directors. I was not really a community activist, although in my own way, I've used my photographs to share with the community. But at least the good core of us were organizers. Discrimination that Chicanos had suffered in the United States were the inspiration and motivation for me seeking to be trained as an organizer, finding a group of young. Chicanos and Chicanas who felt and believed that we needed to do something. La Raza covered a wide range of issues, from everyday life of the Chicano Chicano to anti-police brutality. In between, they looked at issues around education, anti-racism protests. They also covered issues around immigration. There is a wind of change blowing among Mexican-Americans. La Raza has tried to show in its pages the real story of change. The following pages reflect the issues which the people considered so relevant that they have been willing to risk status and jobs, friends and advantages and even their lives to seek redress. The historical achievements of La Raza relative to the Mexican-American community really has to do with the ways in which it constructed a powerful, persuasive, and provocative image of Mexican-Americans. So it painted a picture through photography, art, and political satire of a community that was both within and without American culture, deprived of some of its fundamental values. rights. La Raza was headed at that time by Elie Zarisco, who was Cuban of origin, and Ruth Robinson. They had come down from working in Delano, I believe with El Macriado, to really set up La Raza. This story takes you from the Central Valley to Lincoln Heights, the Church of the Epiphany, where Father Luce was the priest. And he also was enamored with this idea of empowering the poor Mexican-Americans to stand up for their civil rights. And this is the Church of the Epiphany. In the basement where La Raza first started is where Father Luz used to have a clothes hanger. And he had his vestments here. It's where we had our Getty machine. In which we used to type our newspaper and we had a desk like this where we used to lay out the stories and paste them on cardboard before we took them to press. We would go down, break down barriers, confront institutions, what I would call the spearhead of the movement. And that was our primary role, to hide behind that First Amendment by publishing a newspaper. And when the cops stopped us to say, I am a journalist, I am carrying a camera. And so we were community activists, all in the same mindset that we didn't want to see social change. And we did want to address the issues of social injustice within the community. There definitely was a desire to work together to highlight certain aspects of the community, both the challenges the community was facing, but also the... guts and creativity with which they're responding to those. One, two, three, go! We went through a deep awakening, a discovery that we had a history and that there was actually something that we could be proud of in our own culture, our own tradition. We decided that we were going to make a difference. I look at the Chicana and Chicano movement as part of a long struggle for civil rights that goes back to the time when Mexico lost part of its territory to the U.S. Mexican-Americans have constantly been struggling and advocating to be recognized as equal citizens. And I think this aspect of self-determination and freedom and liberty was really a global issue. You saw people in the streets in Mexico in 68. challenging oppression in Paris and in other parts of the world. So I think it was really a global phenomenon. Internationally, we had letters, phone calls from people talking about their movements. We did form a relationship with the civil rights movement, which is a great inspiration to us. There were lots of issues in East L.A. The PLACA patrols the Chicano neighborhoods like the Chicano was some type of animal which has to be kept in a cage. American servicemen from Mexican descent have a higher death rate in Vietnam than other GIs. The teachers are ignorant of Chicano history and culture and don't care to learn about it. And whenever the Chicanos ask for change, the Anglo always says mañana. Chicanos are now serving notice that mañana is now today and that Chicanos are no longer asking for their rights but demanding them now. Ya basta. Ya basta. The walkouts that exploded in 1968 really started much earlier. You had a legacy of young Mexican-Americans being dissatisfied with the kind of education that they were receiving. The reality of education in East L.A., it wasn't academically oriented. Most of these schools where you had large populations of Latino kids, Mexican kids, were vocationally centered. The walkouts were in repudiation of this idiocy. Racism, classism on the part of school administrators and the general public at large, that our kids just simply were not capable of going to college, so give them that kind of preparation. Our kids wanted academic prep. We had been planning the walkouts for months. The students had been meeting on their own high school campuses. The college students had been meeting on college campuses. We had been meeting at La Raza newspaper. The plan was that before the next group graduated, that we would walk out. The first 15 days of March of the year 1968 will be known in the new history of the Southwest as the days of the blowout. Chicano students define blowout as high school students walking out for better education. During those days, more than 10,000 high school students, most of them Chicano, walked out. An incident was a spark that triggered it all, and that was at Wilson High School. Probably the least organized of all the schools that had input from the Chicano movement decided, hey, on our own, we're walking out. There was a protest and a walkout over the principal's decision to cancel a student play. So about 200 kids sparked the walkouts, and that's what we were involved. Once we knew that Wilson had walked out, there was no holding back on all the other schools. We met over at the Church of the Epiphany in the basement of Father Luce's church with some parents, deciding tomorrow's got to be the day, and we're going out. The idea was to have the kids go into the school, and then at a set time... to start walking out simultaneously through all the class levels that were there. Came that designated time, none of the kids were out. So a lot of us in the community went into the school and began to yell to the kids to come out. And we kept running through the hallways yelling, walk out. And the next thing, those doors opened and hundreds, Hundreds and hundreds of students walked out of Lincoln High School. Then it became thousands. There were 3,000 students in Lincoln, and most of them walked out. As they were walking out of school, many of the UMA students would start addressing, or minoritarily lined, or going to march to Hazard Park. And we're going to have a teach-in, and the various college students will line up along with some berets and protect them. Now what I've said to you is that I realize there are limitations, but I'm also saying that we, the students, are demanding that they come. We are only asking you to relay this information. The following day, walkouts continued at Roosevelt High School. So as I remember, by the time we were shooting photographs at Roosevelt High School, it was a large number of students who were standing on stairs going up the side of a building, located at the fences with their faces pressed to the wires, looking out at the protesters. You saw in one shot, for example, a student who managed to climb out without being stopped. by the teachers and police on the other side of the fence, that is, within the property of the school. And there was great cheering and joy when he actually did get over the fence, too. You saw in one shot, for example, someone who may have been a teacher or may have been a parent with a suit on, a man with a suit on, saying, by any means necessary, echoing something we'd heard with Malcolm X and some of the militant members of the African-American community at that time. There are also students on the line. One is a woman who has a sign, something about La Raza, but then also a jacket with the Black Eagle painted on it and signs painted on it. So that when you would see these handmade signs, none of these were printed. It was things that people had made. You were also hearing their voices through those signs. You would see it in the faces in discussions. And that's what you were also, or I was. Trying to capture on film the involvement of different people in that demonstration, in those walkouts. At Roosevelt, it was really very, very difficult, if only because the police were acting very, very harshly and in some cases arresting and beating kids. I was taking pictures, taking pictures of the kids, taking pictures of the cops, taking pictures, things that were going on. I was actually acting very responsibly as a reporter. I seen this young girl, a young teenage girl, and she had been floored, literally thrown to the sidewalk. And I went up to where they were at and said, you know, why are you doing that to a little girl? And that seemed to activate anger among some of the deputies, some of the policemen that were there, and they grabbed me, pulled me around, slammed me to the sidewalk. I had thrown my camera at one of my friends in the kitchen. Take it. And then they grabbed me and threw me into the squad car. And then they drove me to the alley and beat the hell out of me and warned me, we don't want to ever see you again. And then they, boom, they pushed me out and left me there in the alley. and then Walked out and went back to Roosevelt. All of these demonstrations, there were plainclothes policemen in unmarked cars, taking photographs of people in your face. But all that was compiled into the intelligence files, which later on led to arrest. The establishment-run police department of the city of Los Angeles showed their true colors in a week long to be remembered as Los Angeles' Week of Shame. According to official figures released by the DA's office, warrants had been issued for the arrest of 13 Chicano leaders. There was one night that we were in the basement there of Father Luce's church and we talked about the likelihood that we might get arrested. It was an early May, a few weeks later. Grand jury indicted us. Conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor. Disrupting public schools. 15 counts. There were felonies. Each count was worth three years. And the district attorney was prosecuting us seeking consecutive... Sentences, which meant that we were facing 45 years. When we were arrested, I was in the office with Eliseo Risco. And they just came in and didn't show us any search warrant or anything. They just said, you're under arrest, and they started gathering all sorts of paper. They wanted to know who our subscribers were. Eliseo Risco was handcuffed, and then I was handcuffed. We were taken down to Parker Center. of the Los Angeles Police Department. While I was picketing the Hollenbach Police Station over a case of police brutality, and I was walking in front with a group of another 20 picketers, and the police just came right out and got me. The next thing I knew, I was in the Parker Center, which we called the Glass House. There was Eliezer Risco. We were all jailed. Risco had an organizing background with Cesar Chavez, proposed that we go on a hunger strike. And once we started a hunger strike, then they decided, let's get all of these guys together. And so then they put 13 of us together so that they could keep a watch on us. And we were looked upon, not necessarily as criminals, but as political prisoners. We wrote a whole series of numbered communiques. We are entering our third day on the hunger strike. Make no doubt about it, we are political prisoners, and we are paying for our political viewpoints. And we are serving notice to Jefe Placa and his puppet Younger that we will continue to exercise our rights and we'll fight back with every tool available. Do not worry. We know our cause will triumph. And we could hear inside the jail that there were thousands of people outside protesting, chanting. We could actually hear it inside the jail. And later I heard that there were 10,000. That was an exciting moment that we actually embraced. And we decided then and there that our defense would be a political statement. The East LA 13 became the first political trial of the Chicano movement here in California. The East LA 13 trial proved was that our community was convinced that the only way we were going to bring about change was to commit ourselves to legitimate protest, a non-violent protest. After 72 hours of a hunger strike, Cruz Olmeda, Joe Razo, Ilyasel Risco, Moctezuma Esparza, and David Sanchez enjoyed a banquet of Mexican soul food at the restaurant Las Cuatro Milpas. After several months, the whole issue of the arrest of the Italy 13 was dropped. It never went to trial. It was a violation of the law on the... part of the police department that wanted to deprive our community of the right to legitimately protest, which is a constitutional right. As I mentioned to numerous parents, look, your kids are following us. So it's better for you, if you object to what we're doing, get involved. All of a sudden, se les prendió el foco. The light bulb went on. And parents started getting involved to confront the Board of Education. And during the course of that, they also learned what it is to be militant. And that's because their sons and daughters were involved. A crowd of about 400 Mexican-American supporters of Sal Castro invaded the Board of Education last Thursday, demanding the return of Castro to his rightful place at Lincoln High School by the time school opens next month. Because Sal Castro was a schoolteacher and he had been arrested with a felony indictment, the school board decided to take him out of the classroom and to deny him the ability to be a teacher. and to instead put him into some administrative back office function where he could not be in touch with students. So we again decided to protest and to occupy the school board because they refused our request to reinstate him. And we sat in, we slept in at the school board. And that lasted for weeks. Well, the final day, when we had heard that if we didn't get out, we were going to be arrested, we selected those of us who were going to stay. So 35 of us remained there, determined to make our point clear and our commitment clear. We were willing to risk arrest. I'd gone outside Because people that were getting arrested also wanted to take some things out of there. Different things that they didn't want to be arrested with. And so camera bags are very useful for that, so I had a whole bunch of things in my camera bag. And also it was to take pictures of people when they were being escorted to the paddy wagons outside. So I went around to the back and that's where I took a number of shots, but one of them is of Alicia Escalante walking down the stairs with grace and ease and confidence. Someone who started the East L.A. Welfare Rights Organization and was always there to support students during the walkouts. That's one of my favorite photographs, actually. This created the crisis. Front page news, it was constant. The school board couldn't function. But they finally voted to reinstate Sal and put him back in the classroom. And there's an amazing photograph of Sal being carried on the shoulders of several brown berets. In Victor, the school board had caved in and had reinstated him. My name is John Noriega and I'm the director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and we house the La Raza collection of the newspaper and magazine photographs and also a digital archive of over 25,000 images that were shot by La Raza photographers. By the time you see the magazine form, it's become more professionalized. The shift in focus is a little different. There's much greater use of the photography. This is a point of origin where a certain kind of photographic style emerged. It was not just formal and technical. It also had to do with how do you approach a subject that has been left out of photography. It's really fascinating. You can go through and look at these 25,000 images. You can look across them and say, well, there's something interesting where they want to do portraits in public space. They want to do it of children and these amazing photographs of them. Where you see the child really opening up in front of somebody, sometimes they're in the middle of a protest, they're holding picket signs, but they know that somebody that knows them as a member of their community is trying to take their photograph. They are the future. They are imbued with a sense of hope, and they're also imbued with a sense of supporting their community. When they do them of adults, it's often not what you would expect. It's not like everybody's standing their stage. Someone like Oscar Castillo, he's a very dramatic example of something a lot of photographers are doing, which is photographing people from behind as they stand looking out at something. In a sense, that is saying to the viewer, you are in that person's place. You are not just looking at somebody in that space. You are privy to the perspective that he or she had looking at their community, looking at a street protest. That's a very powerful way of using photography to create empathy, but also for the people from that community. To really emphasize, this is how you would be looking at it. And we have now made that into an image that can circulate around the world. The La Raza photographers collectively understood the power that the camera entailed in making one's own image and in making an image of the community from within the community. In that way, they were able to redefine what it meant to be a Mexican-American in Los Angeles and in this nation. So this image by Raul Ruiz, it's a great image of teenagers being teenagers. And it's that sort of boy-girl thing that takes place within the image and within the midst of this very serious political moment and capturing the more day-to-day sort of exchanges and connections between activists, between people from across the community and ways that are relatable on a human level. You typically would not see these images in the Los Angeles Times. The photographs that they would take of people who had been beaten up by the police. You see these people that have been brutalized, that have welts and bruises and everything on their bodies, but they are very relaxed and very calm as their friends go about documenting what happened to them. You have a very different set of relations taking place, and I think it's one of the things that makes this collection so powerful. One of the things that we did have at the magazine was a darkroom. I would go in there and start developing rolls of film and then developing pictures and before I knew it, it was the next day. When I would go home and I had three or four rolls of film, I was afraid because of the sensitivity of the material. And so I would go to my next door neighbor and tell him, Ralph, would you take care of my film? We were being followed and watched by the LAPD and the FBI and they didn't try to hide who they were. They'd stand outside of the magazine with cameras and take pictures of people that were coming in and out. And I think that was a waste of resources because we weren't doing anything illegal. We used every type of camera and every type of film. Some were photography majors. or professional photographers. Others were like me. You picked up a camera strictly as a tool for organizing. I was more concerned about the storyline and the subject we were shooting. And if we shot photographs that had a lot of artistic dimension, then fine, but that wasn't our primary object. Our object was to document history and to tell a story. It was kind of a conflict for me because I wanted to be part of the demonstration. I loved being with everyone, marching, Que viva la raza, que viva la causa. I would try to stay focused on the crowds. That's why I would be up on lampposts or on top of bridges or climbing up on someone's shoulders or trying to get that panoramic shot. I didn't come into this being a photographer. I had to learn how to produce and document a certain activity that would tell a story. And that was on the move. So many technical aspects on the run. And the motion. The motion of the people. I took a number of photographs at the moratorium and one of them was of a sign that was held by a guy with a hat and sunglasses that was, my fight is in the barrio, not in Vietnam, with an image of Che Guevara. In that shot, there is also a guy in military uniform standing next to him. The sense of that moratorium was certainly against Latinos going and dying and being killed in a war that was increasingly unpopular. But there was also, I think, a linkage with broader struggles as well. Che Guevara had been killed, I think, a year or two before. So he was very fresh in our minds. He wasn't simply a face on a T-shirt. And what inspired me about the Chicano moratorium is that it wasn't just calling for ending the war in Vietnam. There was an important report that came out in the late 1960s that showed Mexican-Americans were overrepresented in the number of casualties in Vietnam. And so there were a whole series of marches that were preparing to lead up to the August 29th moratorium that Rosalío Muñoz, Fabi, Elías, and Ramses Noriega, who were the three co-chairs, had been organizing for over a year and a half. There were over 20,000 who marched on Whittier Boulevard, and families and kids. So I was there with my family, with my then-husband, Chris Marcus, my mother. I had an infant daughter at the time, some of my younger cousins, and my aunt. For the beginning of the march and most of the march, I was... taking photographs, which meant you're basically Moving around and taking photographs of people in the march and contingencies and there were people from Denver, there were people from back east, there were allies as well, there I think were some young lords. So these different groups that were there was a very cheerful festive march. And that lasted until we got to what is now Salazar Park, but was Laguna Park, and people settled in. And there were mariachis, and there were folklóricos, and there was food, and the families were having a great time. And... I was using two cameras, one black and white, one color, and continued to take pictures there. The stages were over there in the far corner. That's where the bands were, the performances and the speeches. But I was here with some other friends. I positioned myself at the entrance to the park where the marchers were coming in. But I stayed in the back. I wanted to document people coming in. At a certain point, I don't even think half of the march was in. I really don't believe that because we hadn't filled the park yet. And there were thousands of marchers. So most of us were gathered at the far corner of the park, about a block away from the so-called Green Mill Liquor Store, which supposedly 300 protesters had crashed the liquor store and were stealing things and causing all sorts of disturbance. The owner got upset, locked the doors, and the people were banging on the doors, and that created that so-called incident. Because the police were called supposedly by the owner, they came with the sirens blasting. Apparently the sheriffs dispersed the crowd, and instead of driving that crowd away from the park, they drove them to the park. So it's obvious to me that if you want a confrontation, you drive them to where the public is. All of a sudden, at the other end of Laguna Park, we started to hear and see that the police were rushing on. And then it became this crazy melee. As I was taking pictures in the front, and somebody came up and grabbed me. And they said, you better get back here. The sheriffs are attacking from the back. And I went around back and there was a sea of sheriffs coming towards people. They were firing tear gas canisters. When the kids started running, they're running around, there's no way out. So now they either have to turn around and confront, you know, these people that are attacking them, which is what they did. And kids, and I mean like 10, 11, were trying to push back, hold back the sheriffs so they wouldn't attack. A sitting crowd, the majority of whom were not aware this was going on. And then we were throwing back at them the tear gas canisters. At that point, the sheriffs were really upset and started hitting people with their batons. Music The people were still trying to push them away, trying to defuse it so it wouldn't get more violent. But the sheriffs were not having any of that. And they closed off the streets with their vehicles and their bodies. And people had no place to run to. They tried to go into the side streets and they were met with this force. You know, with the sheriffs with their batons. And it was very frightening. So what had been a sort of joyful celebration and getting together of people all of a sudden becomes a trap because you're being attacked by the sheriffs. And so I was taking photographs of the park with the debris all scattered around, shoes, jackets, instruments, a guitar, different things. And then I think it was Joe who told me, it's not safe, you need to leave. Fairly early on, I went out to the street to take more photographs, and somebody stopped me who I knew. I don't remember who, but said, you know, you better get out of here because the sheriffs know who you are. And I think they were absolutely right. I would have been a target. So we split from the group. Chris was taking pictures. He took a picture of something. We were on Whittier Boulevard, and the police were coming in and got him and threw him down. And then I turned around and screamed. Reach for him, and then the police grabbed me and threw me down, and we were both arrested that day. We were put in the bus, handcuffed us to the seats, and maced us in the face, and laughed at us, said derogatory things to us. So that was a real turning point in my life. Do your helmets press inwardly the whatever brain you might possess? Do you keep them on as shields to drown out cries and cheers of Chicano women, children of humanity? Tell us, do you fear Chicano men? I was photographing the remnants of the violence, it kind of reminded me of the aftermath of a battle, which basically was. So this image by Oscar Castillo, it's one of those images that really invites a close reading, beginning with the pole in the middle of the scene, sort of breaks the image into two images, almost like a film strip, in which you have the police advancing on the left. and sort of the empty space that they've left on the right. And you see, of course, throughout the image, you know, just sort of scattered debris and the flyers that have been trampled as remnants of that raid. It speaks to the ways in which Chicanos and Mexican-Americans were removed from the city, were removed from their neighborhoods. The people were mad and as they went down Whittier Boulevard, I called Raul over and I said, let's go down Whittier Boulevard and take photos. You take one side of the street, I take the other side of the street. And let's keep ourselves visible all the time for safety purposes. We came down Huida Boulevard the same route that Ruben Salazar and his crew had come. five minutes before. Ruben Salazar was a journalist, writer. He is probably the most well-known journalist of the Los Angeles Times, and he was one of the few who would actually take the time to document in a real way the Chicana and Chicano community. So he really uplifted the voice of Mexican Americans at a time that they were feeling nobody cared about their interests. By the time we get to the intersection of Wheater and Laverne, I had the sense that it was over, you know, we were going to rest. And that's why Joy and I went over there to grab a soda, and I said, there's some action going over by this bar. And what was going on, allegedly by the cops, they would later yell, and that was men with guns had gone into the Silver Dollar. Raul started shooting on that corner. I started shooting somewhere in the corner here and then later on as we shot a number of photos then we converged. If the issue is a man with a gun you got these people here pull them out at least they're not the danger anymore but they push them in. And they shot and shot into the dollar. Tear gas, shotgun, a revolver. I counted the number of tear gas firing. About three or four times. Then they turned the car around and they parked it right there, the squad car. And from there, McLaughlin began firing tear gas in here. Remember, the tear gas projector was really a bazooka shell. It was supposed to be used in barricaded situations. This projector can go through walls and then fuel gas on the other side. Well, that's what this thing is used in an open doorway when they knew it was crowded with people. Deputy Sparks gets out of the squad car, comes over here, and kneels behind the post. And he begins shooting into the bar. I was even asking, what the hell are you shooting at? There's nobody there. It's an open doorway. Then and only then did he get into his intercom. You in there in the silver dollar, come out. Later on in the evening, as we were talking in the office of La Raza, you hear in the news that a bar in East L.A. had been... The site of a confrontation and it's alleged that newspaper reporter Ruben Salazar had been killed and I was saying to him, God, I wish you had, I mean, we were there. How come we weren't there? And I kept thinking, oh my God, I think we were there. It was that little bar, I think, that we shot. I said, let's develop this. We went immediately into the dark room and began to develop our photographs and sure enough, it was the Silver Dollar Cafe. Once we knew that we had the photos, then we said, okay, we have to get a special edition of it regarding Ruben's death. And we were using Raul's shot of the sheriff pointing the gun and forcing the people back to the door as the cover of the magazine. Later on, we had a press conference, presented them to the press corps. Everybody was there. All the newspapers, television stations came, and they saw the photography. And Raul presented those unbeknownst to me to the LA Times. As it was only one proviso, I will not accept any money from any of this photography. The only thing we want is credit for ourselves as photographers, Juras and myself. A little tiny itty-bitty community newspaper had scooped the LA Times and all our photography was there on the front page, the second page, the third page. And that just went on for the next three or four days. The repression that took place at the August 29th moratorium had a huge impact on the activism of the Mexican-American community. Part of the reason was the death of Ruben Salazar. That was a tragic reality for everyone. Nobody had expected that kind of violence to take place. You know, it does hurt to think of how much the community suffered that day because it was the first time in Chicano history that mothers and fathers and grandmothers and aunts and uncles and children and the whole community came out and there was such a sense of empowerment. So much hope that day and like Sal Castro would say, it was a wonderful day to be a Chicano. The message was loud and clear. You come out and you try to demonstrate for rights, we will put you in your place. January 31st, 1971. Marcha por Justicia against police violence. It was a hard protest. It was no longer necessarily a community event, which was mostly hardcore activists. And a lot of the young people, again, in anger because of what had happened on August 29th and the accumulation of other issues, they wanted to go protest on Huerta Boulevard. They met again in Belvedere, and then they ran up towards one of the side streets, Arizona. At Arizona and Whittier, they were confronted there by the sheriff's department that was lined up. The demonstration turns confrontation between the sheriffs and the community. And at that time, there were no rubber bullets or the use of rubber bullets. When the sheriffs shot, they shot. And what they were doing was shooting with shotguns right in front of the kids. Shotgun pellets were shooting up. and wounding a lot of kids in the groin, in the legs, in the feet. That's when I captured that scene where Montag, who I thought was a Chicano kid, had been killed. So there's a series of photographs that I took just after he gets shot, and he's picked up by some of the young people, and they're carrying him across the field and onto the sidewalk. People start gathering. His life is expiring. And there's a... No stains, blankets, and it's covering the body. And Raul has this Mexican flag on him, a small little Mexican flag on him. And Raul places a flag upon him, thinking that he's He was a Jewish kid, immigrant kid, from the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles. He passed away. That was one of the moments that I captured. In light of the repressive measures such as mass arrests and repeated rip-offs of leadership which have occurred in our barrios during the past year, a shift in the mood of the community has been noted. I think that we all... withdrew to a certain extent from collective action, focused on what we could do more individually. And I think that was something that not only affected us, but all of the movements in that moment. The mid-70s was a period of reflection for the Chicana and Chicano activists. Some were afraid to take to the streets because of the police violence. The police were definitely surveilling. Many felt like they had to go into hiding in order to stay out of jail. It was no longer a risk that we would be arrested for disturbing the peace of misdemeanor. The risk now became our lives. You are too busy, like Don Quixote, stabbing at the windmills, saving the world, when in essence you haven't taken care of your family. And sometimes you are away from the children so much that you don't see them grow up. And that's defeating the purpose of what La Raza stands for, and that's La Familia. From 1971 to about 1975, we were very much involved with La Raza Unida, establishing the party, running campaigns. In and of itself, that absorbed a lot of time, a lot of energy and resources. It didn't necessarily come to fruition. La Raza people began to move on more into their own independent, individual lives, which is also legitimate. I basically closed the offices in 1977. Gilbert and Pat got married, which is good. I met my wife at La Raza. She was already there. She had been there for several years, and she was an activist there. Yeah, we were both students at the time, both at USC, and eventually we met and we've been married now for 44 years, so I guess it worked out. And when I left La Raza, I went to law school, where I became an activist with subjects of defending undocumented workers and defending immigration rights. Pedro Arias, he's probably the most dedicated of all. He went to fight in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas. I uh I'm very proud of that period of time in my life. I'm very proud of it because I've met such good people, such dedicated people. They gave everything. They had skin in the game. They gave time, gave money, gave, in some cases, blood to a cause they believed in. It's extraordinary that a group of volunteers were able to do this over a 10-year period. For this generation, who are in their 70s at this point, it's a real question. What has changed? It just really hurt that we have not gained as much as we had hoped we would from this movement. Some things I think we did influence and change, and I think others we didn't. I think the legacy of the Chicano movement is in fact that we have broken through. Although there is much to be done, there is now an educated Chicano class. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen, businesswomen. There is now a huge number of elected officials. The way I always envisioned it is that those things would help us and be vehicles to have people in powerful positions to lift the rest of the Chicano population so that the dropout rates would have improved, the jobs would have improved, poverty would have ameliorated itself. And so maybe it just wasn't the fact that we needed more professionals, but that we also had trappings of wanting to bring people forward to the... that had less. Since the Chicano movement came and went, more books have been written, published, people have become professors and PhDs than any other generation. I'm just a little bit happy that I was a small part of it. The importance of really preserving this material, it's on the verge of disintegrating. We're looking at something that is 50 years old, 1968. But you can see how fragile this history is. It's much more fragile than newspapers from the 19th century, which had a high-rag content, and these didn't. And so they've yellowed and they've cracked, and what we've done is to try to assemble a complete set so that people have the ability to come in and look at what was done. To look at the way in which a group of young people took up the role of journalists, photographers, people being active in the political arena, and how they communicated with each other about what was happening. By preserving the documents, the actual magazines themselves, the newspapers, the photography, what there is in recordings, you're perpetuating a legacy. I think the photos tell a story. of what were the conditions at the time. And in many demonstrations and pickets, we show how things were tough at the time that still exist today. So if people can translate those photos into saying, well, wait a minute, if those guys had to put their foot in the door and they were improving things for us to have these positions, we should put our foot in the door. The inertia of the movement is really what people do with their time and how they put their efforts into it, that that's something that's always going to continue. We always envisioned that someday these photographs should be in a place where people could come and see that history, understand that history, learn about it, because that was Los Angeles. The importance of the role that La Raza played back then is important, but I think it's more so now to provide a historical perspective to younger children. So that that generation understands. that the issues that are occurring can be addressed. For our community, they need to know the gains that have occurred as each generation goes by and what they need to strive for and aim for. Chicana and Chicano history is part of U.S. history, and it's an important story that needs to be incorporated into mainstream U.S. history narratives. A big part of what the La Raza Archive aims to do really is... about having a more visible presence and role in society and in American democracy. It was inspiring to see so many people whose wholeheartedness was for the next generation to be better than they were, to have more benefits than they had, to be more included into civil discourse than they are. To you, the viewer, to my raza. Thank you. Art Bound is made possible in part by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the California Arts Council, and others.

was limited and was not interested in the subject. A lot of us wanted to bring out the truth of who we were. We wanted to come out with our own news, with our own version, with our own story. La Raza newspaper was one of the key instruments, tools that we used to then communicate our ideology of chicanismo, the equivalent to what is today Facebook and Twitter. That's how we got the message out.

La Raza was not... Composed basically of brown people. Deborah Weber was white, but she was more Chicana than more Chicano. In the late 60s and early 70s, I was a young 21-year-old, 22-year-old.

I was passionate, excited about things, involved with things, curious and enthusiastic. Gil Lopez and Patricia Borjón were of Native American ancestry. Probably one of the most enlightening experiences I had at La Raza was becoming a photographer.

We contributed and educated one another on those specific skills that possibly we had that others didn't. For instance, Manuel Barrera. He was so instrumental in educating me about photography, about developing film. Raul Ruiz was more of the political side.

He knew about the powers that be and how government worked. and what issues we should key in on for our community. Maria Marcos Sanchez, single mom, a very, very dedicated young woman. Maria worked in every single aspect of La Raza. I started on a 35mm Nikon.

Luis Garza, Luis Garza was a photographer at the magazine at the time. He mentored me as far as developing the film and using the camera. It was a mix of... Personalities and talents of ages, of gender. Some were parents, some were students.

The amount of energy and talent, both professional and raw, was really eclectic. Everybody was dedicated to telling the story. Joe Rossa was ever the lawyer, always keeping us on the straight and narrow.

There were some people that were primarily photographers. I was a contributor. I was not part of the decision-making or the, as they say, their board of directors.

I was not really a community activist, although in my own way, I've used my photographs to share with the community. But at least the good core of us were organizers. Discrimination that Chicanos had suffered in the United States were the inspiration and motivation for me seeking to be trained as an organizer, finding a group of young.

Chicanos and Chicanas who felt and believed that we needed to do something. La Raza covered a wide range of issues, from everyday life of the Chicano Chicano to anti-police brutality. In between, they looked at issues around education, anti-racism protests.

They also covered issues around immigration. There is a wind of change blowing among Mexican-Americans. La Raza has tried to show in its pages the real story of change. The following pages reflect the issues which the people considered so relevant that they have been willing to risk status and jobs, friends and advantages and even their lives to seek redress. The historical achievements of La Raza relative to the Mexican-American community really has to do with the ways in which it constructed a powerful, persuasive, and provocative image of Mexican-Americans.

So it painted a picture through photography, art, and political satire of a community that was both within and without American culture, deprived of some of its fundamental values. rights. La Raza was headed at that time by Elie Zarisco, who was Cuban of origin, and Ruth Robinson. They had come down from working in Delano, I believe with El Macriado, to really set up La Raza. This story takes you from the Central Valley to Lincoln Heights, the Church of the Epiphany, where Father Luce was the priest.

And he also was enamored with this idea of empowering the poor Mexican-Americans to stand up for their civil rights. And this is the Church of the Epiphany. In the basement where La Raza first started is where Father Luz used to have a clothes hanger. And he had his vestments here.

It's where we had our Getty machine. In which we used to type our newspaper and we had a desk like this where we used to lay out the stories and paste them on cardboard before we took them to press. We would go down, break down barriers, confront institutions, what I would call the spearhead of the movement.

And that was our primary role, to hide behind that First Amendment by publishing a newspaper. And when the cops stopped us to say, I am a journalist, I am carrying a camera. And so we were community activists, all in the same mindset that we didn't want to see social change.

And we did want to address the issues of social injustice within the community. There definitely was a desire to work together to highlight certain aspects of the community, both the challenges the community was facing, but also the... guts and creativity with which they're responding to those. One, two, three, go!

We went through a deep awakening, a discovery that we had a history and that there was actually something that we could be proud of in our own culture, our own tradition. We decided that we were going to make a difference. I look at the Chicana and Chicano movement as part of a long struggle for civil rights that goes back to the time when Mexico lost part of its territory to the U.S.

Mexican-Americans have constantly been struggling and advocating to be recognized as equal citizens. And I think this aspect of self-determination and freedom and liberty was really a global issue. You saw people in the streets in Mexico in 68. challenging oppression in Paris and in other parts of the world. So I think it was really a global phenomenon.

Internationally, we had letters, phone calls from people talking about their movements. We did form a relationship with the civil rights movement, which is a great inspiration to us. There were lots of issues in East L.A. The PLACA patrols the Chicano neighborhoods like the Chicano was some type of animal which has to be kept in a cage. American servicemen from Mexican descent have a higher death rate in Vietnam than other GIs.

The teachers are ignorant of Chicano history and culture and don't care to learn about it. And whenever the Chicanos ask for change, the Anglo always says mañana. Chicanos are now serving notice that mañana is now today and that Chicanos are no longer asking for their rights but demanding them now.

Ya basta. Ya basta. The walkouts that exploded in 1968 really started much earlier. You had a legacy of young Mexican-Americans being dissatisfied with the kind of education that they were receiving. The reality of education in East L.A., it wasn't academically oriented.

Most of these schools where you had large populations of Latino kids, Mexican kids, were vocationally centered. The walkouts were in repudiation of this idiocy. Racism, classism on the part of school administrators and the general public at large, that our kids just simply were not capable of going to college, so give them that kind of preparation. Our kids wanted academic prep. We had been planning the walkouts for months.

The students had been meeting on their own high school campuses. The college students had been meeting on college campuses. We had been meeting at La Raza newspaper. The plan was that before the next group graduated, that we would walk out.

The first 15 days of March of the year 1968 will be known in the new history of the Southwest as the days of the blowout. Chicano students define blowout as high school students walking out for better education. During those days, more than 10,000 high school students, most of them Chicano, walked out.

An incident was a spark that triggered it all, and that was at Wilson High School. Probably the least organized of all the schools that had input from the Chicano movement decided, hey, on our own, we're walking out. There was a protest and a walkout over the principal's decision to cancel a student play.

So about 200 kids sparked the walkouts, and that's what we were involved. Once we knew that Wilson had walked out, there was no holding back on all the other schools. We met over at the Church of the Epiphany in the basement of Father Luce's church with some parents, deciding tomorrow's got to be the day, and we're going out. The idea was to have the kids go into the school, and then at a set time...

to start walking out simultaneously through all the class levels that were there. Came that designated time, none of the kids were out. So a lot of us in the community went into the school and began to yell to the kids to come out.

And we kept running through the hallways yelling, walk out. And the next thing, those doors opened and hundreds, Hundreds and hundreds of students walked out of Lincoln High School. Then it became thousands.

There were 3,000 students in Lincoln, and most of them walked out. As they were walking out of school, many of the UMA students would start addressing, or minoritarily lined, or going to march to Hazard Park. And we're going to have a teach-in, and the various college students will line up along with some berets and protect them. Now what I've said to you is that I realize there are limitations, but I'm also saying that we, the students, are demanding that they come.

We are only asking you to relay this information. The following day, walkouts continued at Roosevelt High School. So as I remember, by the time we were shooting photographs at Roosevelt High School, it was a large number of students who were standing on stairs going up the side of a building, located at the fences with their faces pressed to the wires, looking out at the protesters.

You saw in one shot, for example, a student who managed to climb out without being stopped. by the teachers and police on the other side of the fence, that is, within the property of the school. And there was great cheering and joy when he actually did get over the fence, too. You saw in one shot, for example, someone who may have been a teacher or may have been a parent with a suit on, a man with a suit on, saying, by any means necessary, echoing something we'd heard with Malcolm X and some of the militant members of the African-American community at that time.

There are also students on the line. One is a woman who has a sign, something about La Raza, but then also a jacket with the Black Eagle painted on it and signs painted on it. So that when you would see these handmade signs, none of these were printed. It was things that people had made.

You were also hearing their voices through those signs. You would see it in the faces in discussions. And that's what you were also, or I was. Trying to capture on film the involvement of different people in that demonstration, in those walkouts. At Roosevelt, it was really very, very difficult, if only because the police were acting very, very harshly and in some cases arresting and beating kids.

I was taking pictures, taking pictures of the kids, taking pictures of the cops, taking pictures, things that were going on. I was actually acting very responsibly as a reporter. I seen this young girl, a young teenage girl, and she had been floored, literally thrown to the sidewalk.

And I went up to where they were at and said, you know, why are you doing that to a little girl? And that seemed to activate anger among some of the deputies, some of the policemen that were there, and they grabbed me, pulled me around, slammed me to the sidewalk. I had thrown my camera at one of my friends in the kitchen. Take it. And then they grabbed me and threw me into the squad car.

And then they drove me to the alley and beat the hell out of me and warned me, we don't want to ever see you again. And then they, boom, they pushed me out and left me there in the alley. and then Walked out and went back to Roosevelt.

All of these demonstrations, there were plainclothes policemen in unmarked cars, taking photographs of people in your face. But all that was compiled into the intelligence files, which later on led to arrest. The establishment-run police department of the city of Los Angeles showed their true colors in a week long to be remembered as Los Angeles' Week of Shame. According to official figures released by the DA's office, warrants had been issued for the arrest of 13 Chicano leaders. There was one night that we were in the basement there of Father Luce's church and we talked about the likelihood that we might get arrested.

It was an early May, a few weeks later. Grand jury indicted us. Conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor. Disrupting public schools. 15 counts.

There were felonies. Each count was worth three years. And the district attorney was prosecuting us seeking consecutive... Sentences, which meant that we were facing 45 years. When we were arrested, I was in the office with Eliseo Risco.

And they just came in and didn't show us any search warrant or anything. They just said, you're under arrest, and they started gathering all sorts of paper. They wanted to know who our subscribers were.

Eliseo Risco was handcuffed, and then I was handcuffed. We were taken down to Parker Center. of the Los Angeles Police Department.

While I was picketing the Hollenbach Police Station over a case of police brutality, and I was walking in front with a group of another 20 picketers, and the police just came right out and got me. The next thing I knew, I was in the Parker Center, which we called the Glass House. There was Eliezer Risco.

We were all jailed. Risco had an organizing background with Cesar Chavez, proposed that we go on a hunger strike. And once we started a hunger strike, then they decided, let's get all of these guys together.

And so then they put 13 of us together so that they could keep a watch on us. And we were looked upon, not necessarily as criminals, but as political prisoners. We wrote a whole series of numbered communiques. We are entering our third day on the hunger strike.

Make no doubt about it, we are political prisoners, and we are paying for our political viewpoints. And we are serving notice to Jefe Placa and his puppet Younger that we will continue to exercise our rights and we'll fight back with every tool available. Do not worry. We know our cause will triumph.

And we could hear inside the jail that there were thousands of people outside protesting, chanting. We could actually hear it inside the jail. And later I heard that there were 10,000.

That was an exciting moment that we actually embraced. And we decided then and there that our defense would be a political statement. The East LA 13 became the first political trial of the Chicano movement here in California. The East LA 13 trial proved was that our community was convinced that the only way we were going to bring about change was to commit ourselves to legitimate protest, a non-violent protest. After 72 hours of a hunger strike, Cruz Olmeda, Joe Razo, Ilyasel Risco, Moctezuma Esparza, and David Sanchez enjoyed a banquet of Mexican soul food at the restaurant Las Cuatro Milpas.

After several months, the whole issue of the arrest of the Italy 13 was dropped. It never went to trial. It was a violation of the law on the...

part of the police department that wanted to deprive our community of the right to legitimately protest, which is a constitutional right. As I mentioned to numerous parents, look, your kids are following us. So it's better for you, if you object to what we're doing, get involved.

All of a sudden, se les prendió el foco. The light bulb went on. And parents started getting involved to confront the Board of Education. And during the course of that, they also learned what it is to be militant. And that's because their sons and daughters were involved.

A crowd of about 400 Mexican-American supporters of Sal Castro invaded the Board of Education last Thursday, demanding the return of Castro to his rightful place at Lincoln High School by the time school opens next month. Because Sal Castro was a schoolteacher and he had been arrested with a felony indictment, the school board decided to take him out of the classroom and to deny him the ability to be a teacher. and to instead put him into some administrative back office function where he could not be in touch with students. So we again decided to protest and to occupy the school board because they refused our request to reinstate him. And we sat in, we slept in at the school board.

And that lasted for weeks. Well, the final day, when we had heard that if we didn't get out, we were going to be arrested, we selected those of us who were going to stay. So 35 of us remained there, determined to make our point clear and our commitment clear.

We were willing to risk arrest. I'd gone outside Because people that were getting arrested also wanted to take some things out of there. Different things that they didn't want to be arrested with. And so camera bags are very useful for that, so I had a whole bunch of things in my camera bag.

And also it was to take pictures of people when they were being escorted to the paddy wagons outside. So I went around to the back and that's where I took a number of shots, but one of them is of Alicia Escalante walking down the stairs with grace and ease and confidence. Someone who started the East L.A. Welfare Rights Organization and was always there to support students during the walkouts. That's one of my favorite photographs, actually.

This created the crisis. Front page news, it was constant. The school board couldn't function.

But they finally voted to reinstate Sal and put him back in the classroom. And there's an amazing photograph of Sal being carried on the shoulders of several brown berets. In Victor, the school board had caved in and had reinstated him. My name is John Noriega and I'm the director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and we house the La Raza collection of the newspaper and magazine photographs and also a digital archive of over 25,000 images that were shot by La Raza photographers.

By the time you see the magazine form, it's become more professionalized. The shift in focus is a little different. There's much greater use of the photography. This is a point of origin where a certain kind of photographic style emerged.

It was not just formal and technical. It also had to do with how do you approach a subject that has been left out of photography. It's really fascinating. You can go through and look at these 25,000 images.

You can look across them and say, well, there's something interesting where they want to do portraits in public space. They want to do it of children and these amazing photographs of them. Where you see the child really opening up in front of somebody, sometimes they're in the middle of a protest, they're holding picket signs, but they know that somebody that knows them as a member of their community is trying to take their photograph. They are the future.

They are imbued with a sense of hope, and they're also imbued with a sense of supporting their community. When they do them of adults, it's often not what you would expect. It's not like everybody's standing their stage. Someone like Oscar Castillo, he's a very dramatic example of something a lot of photographers are doing, which is photographing people from behind as they stand looking out at something.

In a sense, that is saying to the viewer, you are in that person's place. You are not just looking at somebody in that space. You are privy to the perspective that he or she had looking at their community, looking at a street protest. That's a very powerful way of using photography to create empathy, but also for the people from that community. To really emphasize, this is how you would be looking at it.

And we have now made that into an image that can circulate around the world. The La Raza photographers collectively understood the power that the camera entailed in making one's own image and in making an image of the community from within the community. In that way, they were able to redefine what it meant to be a Mexican-American in Los Angeles and in this nation. So this image by Raul Ruiz, it's a great image of teenagers being teenagers.

And it's that sort of boy-girl thing that takes place within the image and within the midst of this very serious political moment and capturing the more day-to-day sort of exchanges and connections between activists, between people from across the community and ways that are relatable on a human level. You typically would not see these images in the Los Angeles Times. The photographs that they would take of people who had been beaten up by the police.

You see these people that have been brutalized, that have welts and bruises and everything on their bodies, but they are very relaxed and very calm as their friends go about documenting what happened to them. You have a very different set of relations taking place, and I think it's one of the things that makes this collection so powerful. One of the things that we did have at the magazine was a darkroom. I would go in there and start developing rolls of film and then developing pictures and before I knew it, it was the next day. When I would go home and I had three or four rolls of film, I was afraid because of the sensitivity of the material.

And so I would go to my next door neighbor and tell him, Ralph, would you take care of my film? We were being followed and watched by the LAPD and the FBI and they didn't try to hide who they were. They'd stand outside of the magazine with cameras and take pictures of people that were coming in and out. And I think that was a waste of resources because we weren't doing anything illegal.

We used every type of camera and every type of film. Some were photography majors. or professional photographers.

Others were like me. You picked up a camera strictly as a tool for organizing. I was more concerned about the storyline and the subject we were shooting.

And if we shot photographs that had a lot of artistic dimension, then fine, but that wasn't our primary object. Our object was to document history and to tell a story. It was kind of a conflict for me because I wanted to be part of the demonstration. I loved being with everyone, marching, Que viva la raza, que viva la causa. I would try to stay focused on the crowds.

That's why I would be up on lampposts or on top of bridges or climbing up on someone's shoulders or trying to get that panoramic shot. I didn't come into this being a photographer. I had to learn how to produce and document a certain activity that would tell a story. And that was on the move. So many technical aspects on the run.

And the motion. The motion of the people. I took a number of photographs at the moratorium and one of them was of a sign that was held by a guy with a hat and sunglasses that was, my fight is in the barrio, not in Vietnam, with an image of Che Guevara. In that shot, there is also a guy in military uniform standing next to him. The sense of that moratorium was certainly against Latinos going and dying and being killed in a war that was increasingly unpopular.

But there was also, I think, a linkage with broader struggles as well. Che Guevara had been killed, I think, a year or two before. So he was very fresh in our minds.

He wasn't simply a face on a T-shirt. And what inspired me about the Chicano moratorium is that it wasn't just calling for ending the war in Vietnam. There was an important report that came out in the late 1960s that showed Mexican-Americans were overrepresented in the number of casualties in Vietnam.

And so there were a whole series of marches that were preparing to lead up to the August 29th moratorium that Rosalío Muñoz, Fabi, Elías, and Ramses Noriega, who were the three co-chairs, had been organizing for over a year and a half. There were over 20,000 who marched on Whittier Boulevard, and families and kids. So I was there with my family, with my then-husband, Chris Marcus, my mother. I had an infant daughter at the time, some of my younger cousins, and my aunt. For the beginning of the march and most of the march, I was...

taking photographs, which meant you're basically Moving around and taking photographs of people in the march and contingencies and there were people from Denver, there were people from back east, there were allies as well, there I think were some young lords. So these different groups that were there was a very cheerful festive march. And that lasted until we got to what is now Salazar Park, but was Laguna Park, and people settled in.

And there were mariachis, and there were folklóricos, and there was food, and the families were having a great time. And... I was using two cameras, one black and white, one color, and continued to take pictures there.

The stages were over there in the far corner. That's where the bands were, the performances and the speeches. But I was here with some other friends. I positioned myself at the entrance to the park where the marchers were coming in.

But I stayed in the back. I wanted to document people coming in. At a certain point, I don't even think half of the march was in. I really don't believe that because we hadn't filled the park yet. And there were thousands of marchers.

So most of us were gathered at the far corner of the park, about a block away from the so-called Green Mill Liquor Store, which supposedly 300 protesters had crashed the liquor store and were stealing things and causing all sorts of disturbance. The owner got upset, locked the doors, and the people were banging on the doors, and that created that so-called incident. Because the police were called supposedly by the owner, they came with the sirens blasting. Apparently the sheriffs dispersed the crowd, and instead of driving that crowd away from the park, they drove them to the park. So it's obvious to me that if you want a confrontation, you drive them to where the public is.

All of a sudden, at the other end of Laguna Park, we started to hear and see that the police were rushing on. And then it became this crazy melee. As I was taking pictures in the front, and somebody came up and grabbed me.

And they said, you better get back here. The sheriffs are attacking from the back. And I went around back and there was a sea of sheriffs coming towards people.

They were firing tear gas canisters. When the kids started running, they're running around, there's no way out. So now they either have to turn around and confront, you know, these people that are attacking them, which is what they did. And kids, and I mean like 10, 11, were trying to push back, hold back the sheriffs so they wouldn't attack.

A sitting crowd, the majority of whom were not aware this was going on. And then we were throwing back at them the tear gas canisters. At that point, the sheriffs were really upset and started hitting people with their batons. Music The people were still trying to push them away, trying to defuse it so it wouldn't get more violent. But the sheriffs were not having any of that.

And they closed off the streets with their vehicles and their bodies. And people had no place to run to. They tried to go into the side streets and they were met with this force. You know, with the sheriffs with their batons.

And it was very frightening. So what had been a sort of joyful celebration and getting together of people all of a sudden becomes a trap because you're being attacked by the sheriffs. And so I was taking photographs of the park with the debris all scattered around, shoes, jackets, instruments, a guitar, different things.

And then I think it was Joe who told me, it's not safe, you need to leave. Fairly early on, I went out to the street to take more photographs, and somebody stopped me who I knew. I don't remember who, but said, you know, you better get out of here because the sheriffs know who you are. And I think they were absolutely right. I would have been a target.

So we split from the group. Chris was taking pictures. He took a picture of something.

We were on Whittier Boulevard, and the police were coming in and got him and threw him down. And then I turned around and screamed. Reach for him, and then the police grabbed me and threw me down, and we were both arrested that day.

We were put in the bus, handcuffed us to the seats, and maced us in the face, and laughed at us, said derogatory things to us. So that was a real turning point in my life. Do your helmets press inwardly the whatever brain you might possess?

Do you keep them on as shields to drown out cries and cheers of Chicano women, children of humanity? Tell us, do you fear Chicano men? I was photographing the remnants of the violence, it kind of reminded me of the aftermath of a battle, which basically was. So this image by Oscar Castillo, it's one of those images that really invites a close reading, beginning with the pole in the middle of the scene, sort of breaks the image into two images, almost like a film strip, in which you have the police advancing on the left.

and sort of the empty space that they've left on the right. And you see, of course, throughout the image, you know, just sort of scattered debris and the flyers that have been trampled as remnants of that raid. It speaks to the ways in which Chicanos and Mexican-Americans were removed from the city, were removed from their neighborhoods.

The people were mad and as they went down Whittier Boulevard, I called Raul over and I said, let's go down Whittier Boulevard and take photos. You take one side of the street, I take the other side of the street. And let's keep ourselves visible all the time for safety purposes. We came down Huida Boulevard the same route that Ruben Salazar and his crew had come.

five minutes before. Ruben Salazar was a journalist, writer. He is probably the most well-known journalist of the Los Angeles Times, and he was one of the few who would actually take the time to document in a real way the Chicana and Chicano community. So he really uplifted the voice of Mexican Americans at a time that they were feeling nobody cared about their interests.

By the time we get to the intersection of Wheater and Laverne, I had the sense that it was over, you know, we were going to rest. And that's why Joy and I went over there to grab a soda, and I said, there's some action going over by this bar. And what was going on, allegedly by the cops, they would later yell, and that was men with guns had gone into the Silver Dollar. Raul started shooting on that corner. I started shooting somewhere in the corner here and then later on as we shot a number of photos then we converged.

If the issue is a man with a gun you got these people here pull them out at least they're not the danger anymore but they push them in. And they shot and shot into the dollar. Tear gas, shotgun, a revolver.

I counted the number of tear gas firing. About three or four times. Then they turned the car around and they parked it right there, the squad car.

And from there, McLaughlin began firing tear gas in here. Remember, the tear gas projector was really a bazooka shell. It was supposed to be used in barricaded situations. This projector can go through walls and then fuel gas on the other side.

Well, that's what this thing is used in an open doorway when they knew it was crowded with people. Deputy Sparks gets out of the squad car, comes over here, and kneels behind the post. And he begins shooting into the bar. I was even asking, what the hell are you shooting at?

There's nobody there. It's an open doorway. Then and only then did he get into his intercom.

You in there in the silver dollar, come out. Later on in the evening, as we were talking in the office of La Raza, you hear in the news that a bar in East L.A. had been... The site of a confrontation and it's alleged that newspaper reporter Ruben Salazar had been killed and I was saying to him, God, I wish you had, I mean, we were there. How come we weren't there?

And I kept thinking, oh my God, I think we were there. It was that little bar, I think, that we shot. I said, let's develop this. We went immediately into the dark room and began to develop our photographs and sure enough, it was the Silver Dollar Cafe. Once we knew that we had the photos, then we said, okay, we have to get a special edition of it regarding Ruben's death.

And we were using Raul's shot of the sheriff pointing the gun and forcing the people back to the door as the cover of the magazine. Later on, we had a press conference, presented them to the press corps. Everybody was there. All the newspapers, television stations came, and they saw the photography. And Raul presented those unbeknownst to me to the LA Times.

As it was only one proviso, I will not accept any money from any of this photography. The only thing we want is credit for ourselves as photographers, Juras and myself. A little tiny itty-bitty community newspaper had scooped the LA Times and all our photography was there on the front page, the second page, the third page. And that just went on for the next three or four days. The repression that took place at the August 29th moratorium had a huge impact on the activism of the Mexican-American community.

Part of the reason was the death of Ruben Salazar. That was a tragic reality for everyone. Nobody had expected that kind of violence to take place.

You know, it does hurt to think of how much the community suffered that day because it was the first time in Chicano history that mothers and fathers and grandmothers and aunts and uncles and children and the whole community came out and there was such a sense of empowerment. So much hope that day and like Sal Castro would say, it was a wonderful day to be a Chicano. The message was loud and clear. You come out and you try to demonstrate for rights, we will put you in your place.

January 31st, 1971. Marcha por Justicia against police violence. It was a hard protest. It was no longer necessarily a community event, which was mostly hardcore activists.

And a lot of the young people, again, in anger because of what had happened on August 29th and the accumulation of other issues, they wanted to go protest on Huerta Boulevard. They met again in Belvedere, and then they ran up towards one of the side streets, Arizona. At Arizona and Whittier, they were confronted there by the sheriff's department that was lined up.

The demonstration turns confrontation between the sheriffs and the community. And at that time, there were no rubber bullets or the use of rubber bullets. When the sheriffs shot, they shot. And what they were doing was shooting with shotguns right in front of the kids. Shotgun pellets were shooting up.

and wounding a lot of kids in the groin, in the legs, in the feet. That's when I captured that scene where Montag, who I thought was a Chicano kid, had been killed. So there's a series of photographs that I took just after he gets shot, and he's picked up by some of the young people, and they're carrying him across the field and onto the sidewalk.

People start gathering. His life is expiring. And there's a...

No stains, blankets, and it's covering the body. And Raul has this Mexican flag on him, a small little Mexican flag on him. And Raul places a flag upon him, thinking that he's He was a Jewish kid, immigrant kid, from the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles. He passed away. That was one of the moments that I captured.

In light of the repressive measures such as mass arrests and repeated rip-offs of leadership which have occurred in our barrios during the past year, a shift in the mood of the community has been noted. I think that we all... withdrew to a certain extent from collective action, focused on what we could do more individually. And I think that was something that not only affected us, but all of the movements in that moment.

The mid-70s was a period of reflection for the Chicana and Chicano activists. Some were afraid to take to the streets because of the police violence. The police were definitely surveilling. Many felt like they had to go into hiding in order to stay out of jail. It was no longer a risk that we would be arrested for disturbing the peace of misdemeanor.

The risk now became our lives. You are too busy, like Don Quixote, stabbing at the windmills, saving the world, when in essence you haven't taken care of your family. And sometimes you are away from the children so much that you don't see them grow up.

And that's defeating the purpose of what La Raza stands for, and that's La Familia. From 1971 to about 1975, we were very much involved with La Raza Unida, establishing the party, running campaigns. In and of itself, that absorbed a lot of time, a lot of energy and resources. It didn't necessarily come to fruition. La Raza people began to move on more into their own independent, individual lives, which is also legitimate.

I basically closed the offices in 1977. Gilbert and Pat got married, which is good. I met my wife at La Raza. She was already there. She had been there for several years, and she was an activist there. Yeah, we were both students at the time, both at USC, and eventually we met and we've been married now for 44 years, so I guess it worked out.

And when I left La Raza, I went to law school, where I became an activist with subjects of defending undocumented workers and defending immigration rights. Pedro Arias, he's probably the most dedicated of all. He went to fight in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas.

I uh I'm very proud of that period of time in my life. I'm very proud of it because I've met such good people, such dedicated people. They gave everything. They had skin in the game.

They gave time, gave money, gave, in some cases, blood to a cause they believed in. It's extraordinary that a group of volunteers were able to do this over a 10-year period. For this generation, who are in their 70s at this point, it's a real question.

What has changed? It just really hurt that we have not gained as much as we had hoped we would from this movement. Some things I think we did influence and change, and I think others we didn't.

I think the legacy of the Chicano movement is in fact that we have broken through. Although there is much to be done, there is now an educated Chicano class. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen, businesswomen. There is now a huge number of elected officials. The way I always envisioned it is that those things would help us and be vehicles to have people in powerful positions to lift the rest of the Chicano population so that the dropout rates would have improved, the jobs would have improved, poverty would have ameliorated itself.

And so maybe it just wasn't the fact that we needed more professionals, but that we also had trappings of wanting to bring people forward to the... that had less. Since the Chicano movement came and went, more books have been written, published, people have become professors and PhDs than any other generation.

I'm just a little bit happy that I was a small part of it. The importance of really preserving this material, it's on the verge of disintegrating. We're looking at something that is 50 years old, 1968. But you can see how fragile this history is. It's much more fragile than newspapers from the 19th century, which had a high-rag content, and these didn't.

And so they've yellowed and they've cracked, and what we've done is to try to assemble a complete set so that people have the ability to come in and look at what was done. To look at the way in which a group of young people took up the role of journalists, photographers, people being active in the political arena, and how they communicated with each other about what was happening. By preserving the documents, the actual magazines themselves, the newspapers, the photography, what there is in recordings, you're perpetuating a legacy. I think the photos tell a story.

of what were the conditions at the time. And in many demonstrations and pickets, we show how things were tough at the time that still exist today. So if people can translate those photos into saying, well, wait a minute, if those guys had to put their foot in the door and they were improving things for us to have these positions, we should put our foot in the door.

The inertia of the movement is really what people do with their time and how they put their efforts into it, that that's something that's always going to continue. We always envisioned that someday these photographs should be in a place where people could come and see that history, understand that history, learn about it, because that was Los Angeles. The importance of the role that La Raza played back then is important, but I think it's more so now to provide a historical perspective to younger children.

So that that generation understands. that the issues that are occurring can be addressed. For our community, they need to know the gains that have occurred as each generation goes by and what they need to strive for and aim for.

Chicana and Chicano history is part of U.S. history, and it's an important story that needs to be incorporated into mainstream U.S. history narratives. A big part of what the La Raza Archive aims to do really is... about having a more visible presence and role in society and in American democracy.

It was inspiring to see so many people whose wholeheartedness was for the next generation to be better than they were, to have more benefits than they had, to be more included into civil discourse than they are. To you, the viewer, to my raza. Thank you. Art Bound is made possible in part by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the California Arts Council, and others.

Transcript for:La Raza Newspaper and Chicano Movement

Transcript for:
La Raza Newspaper and Chicano Movement