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This resolution was adopted at the SWP’s Twenty-seventh National Convention in August 1976. Printed in SWP Internal Discussion Bulletin
Transcribed & marked up by Andrew Pollack for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A powerful movement against the superexploitation of Chicanos by American capitalism emerged in the 1960s. The nation’s second largest oppressed nationality launched a series of social struggles. These included the fight for bilingual-bicultural education; the drive by Chicano farm workers to organize agribusiness in the Southwest; the movement to regain stolen lands; the fight for more political rights and control over institutions in the Chicano community; the formation of Raza Unida parties. The radicalization of an oppressed people who are overwhelmingly proletarian had begun.
In the decade and a half since that awakening the Chicano movement has gained valuable experience that will help guide future battles. But the movement today faces new challenges stemming from the changed international and national context in which its struggles are unfolding. The upsurge of the Chicano movement began before the 1971 wage freeze, before the meat shortage, the oil crisis, the shock of double-digit inflation, before Watergate, before the 1974-75 depression with double-digit unemployment, and before the new ruling class drive to cut social services to the bone.
The first wave of struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s won important concessions such as increased educational opportunities, bilingual ballots in some elections, better wages and working conditions for the farm workers organized in the UFW. Today even those gains are under attack. And the chronic problems faced by the Chicano people, far from improving, are growing worse. They, like the other oppressed national minorities, are forced to bear a disproportionate burden of the effects of the economic crisis and the employers’ offensive.
Chicanos suffer a dual oppression. They are discriminated against because of race, culture, and language. And as part of the working class they are exploited as wage labor. Chicanos are second class citizens in U.S. society. Higher unemployment levels, lower wages, minimal job security, substandard housing, higher mortality rates, racist education that produces high levels of illiteracy, a virtual absence of Chicano representation at all government levels—such are the facts of Chicano life. These conditions will continue to precipitate struggles and generate demands the U.S. rulers will find increasingly difficult to meet.
This resolution aims to assess the state of the Chicano movement as it faces this new period. It stands on “The Struggle for Chicano Liberation,” adopted by the 1971 convention of the Socialist Workers Party, and on “Prospects for Socialism in America,” adopted by the 1975 convention. The resolutions affirm the SWP’s unconditional support to the struggle for Chicano self-determination, up to and including the right to a separate country if the Chicano people so decide. The 1971 resolution assesses the progressive role of the new rise of Chicano nationalism and draws the balance sheet on the first wave of Chicano struggles. Together with “Prospects for Socialism in America,” it discusses the main elements of a program that can orient the Chicano people in a successful fight for political and economic emancipation from U.S. capitalism.
This current resolution concentrates on what has changed since 1971, what is new and what is to be learned from the struggles of the last five years.
The militant resurgence of Chicano nationalism is rooted in significant changes that began during World War II and continued throughout the postwar period. The last thirty-five years have witnessed a migration of Chicanos from the rural areas into the urban centers, their incorporation into the industrial working class, and a significant growth of the Chicano population brought about by the immigration of large numbers of Mexican workers.
The Chicano movement emerged under the impact of profound national and international events that shaped the worldwide youth radicalization of the 1960s. Chicanos, like youth and Blacks, were deeply affected and inspired by the advances of the colonial revolutions, particularly the Cuban revolution. At the same time, the success; of the civil rights movement and the rise of Black nationalist consciousness had a major impact on Chicanos.
Chicanos benefited directly from the mass struggles of Blacks during this period. The gains won by the civil rights movement and the concessions made by the capitalists in the wake of the 1964-67 Black ghetto uprisings were to one degree or another extended to the Chicano population. This occurred without their having to mobilize on the same scale that the Black population did to force these concessions. The gains helped to spur Chicanos into a struggle against their own specific oppression and exploitation. While Chicanos learned from the example of the Black struggle, several important differences should be noted.
* Chicanos are bound by a common language that is different from the language of their oppressors. Estimates vary, but probably as much as one-half of the Chicano population view Spanish as their primary language. The stifling of the Spanish language and the related cultural oppression are central to the maintenance of Chicanos as second class citizens. This issue sparked militant struggles in the Chicano community even before the Chicano high school blowouts in several southwestern cities in 1968-69.
* More than 85 percent of the Chicano population live in a well-defined geographical area of the country—the southwestern states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, California, and Texas, sometimes referred to as Aztlán. They are bound by history, culture, and language to both Mexico and the United States.
* Chicanos are the victims of the racist immigration policies of the U.S. ruling class. Harassment and deportation of Mexicanos working in the U.S. without immigration visas is standard government policy, aimed at discouraging Mexicano and Chicano workers from organizing or fighting to improve their lot. Such racist policies are designed to intimidate the entire Chicano population.
These and other aspects of their oppression help determine the character of the Chicanos as a unique people distinct from any other oppressed national grouping in the United States. They also determine the axes of the struggles that have given rise to a new generation of militant Chicano fighters.
A focal point of the Chicano movement from the mid-1960s to the present has been the organizing by the farm workers, led by César Chávez. From its inception, the farm workers saw their movement as a social movement combining the fight for social justice for the superexploited campesinos with the drive to win collective bargaining rights and union benefits.
Together with the New Mexico land-grant movement, la causa—the cause, as the farm workers call their movement—forced the plight of Chicanos into the public eye and marked their social and political awakening as a people. This effort provided the initial impulses for the Chicano radicalization. The farm workers have won broad support for their fight among students, Blacks, Puerto Ricaris, women, unionists, and other working people. Such solidarity has helped to demonstrate that the enemy is the same and points toward the need to organize and mobilize all working people to replace capitalism with socialism.
Opposition to the imperialist war in Vietnam, spurred by the high casualty rates for Chicano GIs, fueled the militancy and combativity of the Chicano people. Chicanos mobilized by the tens of thousands in several important actions against the war. The most significant was the National Chicano Moratorium in August 1970, when 30,000 Chicanos demonstrated in East Los Angeles. These demonstrations had a profound impact on the Chicano people, the rulers’ attitude toward them, and the course of the opposition to the war.
By linking the imperialist war in Vietnam to the oppression Chicanos suffer in the United States, these antiwar actions countered the lies peddled by the capitalist media that Chicanos, Blacks, other oppressed groups, and working people in general had nothing to gain from joining the antiwar movement, which they tried to portray as a white, middle class student movement. The Chicano mobilizations helped to inspire the development of similar actions in the Black community, although not of the same massive size. They also helped deepen consciousness among Chicanos of the need to oppose U.S. imperialism in the colonial and semicolonial world.
Chicano activists became more interested in political developments in these countries, particularly Latin America. This interest has deepened over the last five years. Many have rallied to the defense of Latin American political prisoners, demonstrated against U.S. support to the bloody Chilean junta, joined actions demanding “U.S. Hands Off Angola,” and other similar protests against U.S. imperialist ventures. Awakening internationalism among Chicanos has been reflected in growing interest and collaboration between Chicanos and the Mexican student and workers’ movements, and stronger ties to the struggles of Puerto Ricans both in the United States and in Puerto Rico.
The emergence of the women’s movement at the crest of the radicalization of the 1960s and the continuing spread of feminist ideas has also had a deep impact on the Chicano struggle, especially on Chicanas. The triple oppression Chicanas face because of sex, nationality, and class places them among the most impoverished and least educated sections of the American population.
Chicanas receive miserably low wages. A study of government income figures in 1973, before the worst of the economic crisis, showed that nearly 50 percent of all Chicanas employed that year earned less than $2,000. Nearly 75 percent of Chicana workers in 1973 had incomes under $4,000.
The feminist and nationalist struggles of the last decade have spurred the development of Chicana feminist organizations in opposition to the racist practice of forced sterilization and in support of the right to safe and legal abortions. Chicanas are beginning to participate in united-front activities with other women for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, against cutbacks in child care and other social services, and against attacks on affirmative action programs.
At the same time, heightened feminist consciousness among Chicanas has had a major effect on the Chicano movement as a whole. Four or five years ago Chicanas had to fight against exclusion from the leadership bodies of Chicano movement organizations. While they still have to argue with Chicano male leaders who oppose feminism as a “white women’s thing” that is supposedly divisive and irrelevant to the Chicano struggle, in the last several years a striking change has taken place. Many of the Raza Unida parties and Chicano student organizations have included demands for women’s rights in their platforms and have Chicana commissions or caucuses. The United Farm Workers have a growing number of Chicanas as prominent spokespeople as well as organizers of the boycott movement. Several important Chicana conferences have been held in recent years to discuss the issues facing Chicanas, and this spread of feminist ideas can be expected to continue to influence the Chicano movement.
Their third class economic and social status in American society gives the straggles of Chicanas against their oppression as women an explosive character.
Another important component in the struggles of Chicanos in the last fifteen years has been the Chicano student movement. Chicano college and high school students registered important gains through their struggles for bilingual-bicultural education and more high school rights, and through fights for open admissions, Chicano studies, and hiring of more Chicano faculty and staff.
Chicano students remain the most radicalized layer of the Chicano population, although today they are less organized than five years ago. The MEChAs (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán—Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán), MAYOs (Mexican-American Youth Organization), and UMASes (United Mexican-American Students) helped to organize and mobilize support for the farm workers, undocumented Mexicano workers and other Chicano community struggles. They played a role in popularizing the concept of independent Chicano political action and helped launch the Raza Unida parties, the most advanced political organizations yet to emerge out of the Chicano struggles.
Over the last five years the Chicano student movement has been weakened by a crisis of perspectives and leadership, and many of the Chicano student groups have retreated into becoming social clubs. The statewide MAYO in Texas, for example, no longer exists. Others have been drawn into community “poverty” programs sponsored and funded by government agencies. Still others were drawn into sectarian political schemes. No student organization has yet emerged from these recent experiences with a perspective of organizing and mobilizing the masses of Chicano students around clear and concrete demands that are fought for on every level, from actions in the streets to the building of the Raza Unida parties as mass Chicano political parties independent of and opposed to the two parties of capitalist rule in this country.
But the government’s growing offensive against the rights and gains of Chicano students has begun to encounter resistance and to revitalize the Chicano student movement. A number of conferences held over the last year have drawn Chicano students into discussions and debates on how to move the Chicano struggle forward in the face of this racist offensive, despite differences on other questions. Chicano students are once again beginning to play a bigger role in campus struggles against budget cuts, and in organizing student support for the Coors beer boycott and the UFW-called boycotts of lettuce, grapes, and Gallo wines. Another indication of this increased activity among Chicano students is their role in building a response to cop killings of Chicano youth in National City and San José, California, in the spring of 1976.
The 1960s were a decade of unprecedented capitalist prosperity and expansion, which incorporated growing numbers of Chicanos into the work force. It brought a rising standard of living for many of the most oppressed. Yet even under these conditions, Chicano unemployment in 1969 officially stood at 6 percent (nearly double the national average for whites). Median Chicano family income was less than 70 percent of that for Anglos.
Despite any temporary upturns, American capitalism has entered a long-term period of economic crisis and stagnation. The future will generally see higher, not lower, unemployment levels; high inflation rates; fewer, not more, social services; falling, not rising, standards of living for working people.
In keeping with a centuries-old policy of divide and rule, the American ruling class will make every effort to shift a disproportionate burden of this economic crisis onto the Chicano population.
They will attempt to derail struggles against the deteriorating living standards of all American workers, Anglo and Chicano alike, by fostering racist and xenophobic attitudes that deepen the divisions they have created in the working class. These will be used to bolster the reactionary idea that a lion’s share of the crisis should be borne by Chicanos and other oppressed nationalities, and that social, economic, and political advances they have made through struggle in recent years should be rolled back. The ruling class will make sure that the cutbacks in social services hurt Chicanos more than Anglos: more hospitals will be closed in Chicano areas than Anglo; more schools will cut out bilingual programs than programs vital to Anglos; rising costs for basic necessities like food, housing, water, heat, light, transportation, health care, will take a bigger bite out of Chicano incomes than Anglo; public transportation systems will be reduced more in Chicano areas than Anglo, welfare cutbacks will affect a larger portion of the Chicano population than of the Anglo; regressive taxes will take a larger chunk of Chicano budgets than of Anglo, etc., etc.
A 1974 government report on low-income Americans and poverty in the United States showed that 12 percent of the total population had incomes below the official poverty level. At the same time, approximately 23 percent of what the government statisticians call “people of Spanish origin” fell below the poverty line. The real situation is even worse than those figures indicate since the government camouflages the full picture by lumping Chicanos into a catchall category of “Hispanic-Americans” that covers all Latinos, including those who have a relatively higher standard of living than Chicanos or Puerto Ricans.
The impact of the economic crisis will make itself felt with particular acuteness in three areas, each of which has already generated important struggles: the fight for jobs and against discriminatory hiring and layoff practices; the fight against deportations and racist immigration policies; and the fight for an equal education, a bilingual-bicultural education.
1. Jobs
Chronically high Chicano unemployment rates have risen dramatically under the impact of the 1974-75 depression. Joblessness among the Latino work force officially rose from 8.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 1974 to 11.8 percent in the same quarter of 1975. But these statistics do not include the tens of thousands of Chicanos who are simply not counted because they have never before been in the work force and don’t qualify for unemployment benefits. Nor do they count the large number of Chicanos who are underemployed in part-time or seasonal jobs, or those who have given up looking for work. The real picture can be seen in the fact that overall unemployment in the Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles is estimated to be closer to 45 percent, and as high as 60 percent among Chicano youth.
The disproportionately high unemployment rates in the Chicano barrios pose two interrelated issues: the right to a job, and the struggle against discriminatory hiring and layoff practices which double the burden of unemployment borne by Chicano workers.
The fight for jobs—a struggle that has not yet been taken up in any serious way by the leadership of the U.S. labor movement despite the high unemployment rates of recent years—revolves around two basic demands. One is the need for an emergency government-financed public works program to create millions of socially useful jobs. Among the projects involved could be the construction in the Chicano community of decent, low-cost housing; hospitals, health care and child care centers, schools, mass transit systems, parks, recreation centers, and other needed social services.
The second demand is for a shortening of the workweek with no cut in pay. This would spread the available work and help guarantee everyone a job. These are the measures behind which the labor movement as a whole, including Chicanos, must mobilize if the rulers are to be prevented from pushing through massive cutbacks in social services and shifting the burden of the economic crisis onto the backs of the working class. Especially in industries and areas where Chicanos are numerically strong, the Chicano movement must raise such issues, explain them, and demand that the entire labor movement fight for them.
Chicano workers face an additional problem. Discriminatory employment practices are consciously and systematically used by the capitalists to divide and weaken the working class as a whole, and to maintain a low-cost labor pool that can be utilized to drive down the wages of all workers.
In recent years significant gains have been won by Chicano and other minority workers through struggles that established preferential hiring, promotion, and training programs that opened previously closed job opportunities to Chicano workers. The massive layoffs in the 1974-75 depression were often used to wipe out affirmative action gains. Chicano, Black, Puerto Rican, and women workers became the first victims of the bosses’ racist and sexist employment practices.
Special measures are required to fight the job discrimination imposed by generations of racist discrimination. This is doubly true in periods of economic crisis when the employers try to take advantage of the high unemployment to drive back any gains made by the most oppressed sections of the working class. Chicanos should join with Black and Puerto Rican workers, women workers, and others who see the need for class solidarity against the employers’ attempts to divide the workers along race and sex lines. They should demand that, when layoffs do occur, the bosses should not be permitted to utilize the layoffs to reduce the percentage of Chicano, Black, and women workers, the most vulnerable victims of discriminatory employment practices.
The struggle against discriminatory layoffs has already generated a number of important battles, including one currently under way at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. An estimated 70 percent of the Chicanos employed there are threatened with layoffs. Court action is being taken against the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the Air Force Logistics Command to halt the racist moves.
The fight against discriminatory layoffs is a precondition to establishing the elementary ties of class solidarity within the labor movement, based on support for the needs of the most oppressed and exploited layers of the working class. It is the only way to combat the racist divisions within the working class that are fostered by the employers, who try to convince the relatively privileged worker that his individual need of a job can be solved only if someone else—one of “them”—gets laid off instead of him.
The fight against discriminatory layoffs also poses the need to transform the unions into organizations of class struggle that fight for their members’ needs and champion the demands of all the oppressed, both on and off the job. The bureaucratic misleaders of the trade unions today base themselves on the most privileged white workers. Far from defending the oppressed sectors of the working class, far from fighting the discriminatory layoffs, they have by and large taken a stand of defending the seniority system to justify the firing of disproportionately large numbers of Chicano workers. It should be remembered that the seniority system itself was an earlier victory won through struggles by working; people to prevent the bosses from arbitrarily firing whomever they please. Today the labor movement has to prevent the capitalists from perverting the principle of seniority to strengthen the rulers’ racist hiring practices.
2. Immigration and Deportation
Closely linked to the struggle against job discrimination is the fight against racist immigration policies that have resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Mexicano, Central American, and Caribbean workers without immigration visas.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) of the Justice Department, which has an interest in hiding the real facts in order to bolster its racist drive, estimates that there are between 6 and 8 million workers in the United States without papers. One to 4 million of these “illegal aliens,” the INS claims, cross or are brought across the U.S. borders yearly in search of better jobs. Of these, 85 to 90 percent come from Mexico.
While accurate data is not available, some government statisticians estimate that undocumented workers today comprise close to 8 percent of the total U.S. work force. The majority of these workers are concentrated in the garment and textile industries, rubber and plastics, stone and clay, cosmetics, furniture, food processing, and footwear. Others are involved in the manufacture of some metals, laundry services, railroad transportation, and construction. Virtually all are in the lowest-paying, unskilled categories of these industries. American agribusiness remains one of the major employers of Mexicano workers, both with and without papers.
Mexican immigration has always been an important factor in the Chicano work force, and in the Chicano population as a whole. It has helped to swell the ranks of the Chicano nationality and constantly reinforces the cultural and historical ties between Chicanos and their Mexican brothers and sisters.
In the early part of this century, Mexican immigration was encouraged by the U.S. capitalists in order to provide a cheap source of labor in their fields and textile mills. Semicolonial conditions in Mexico facilitated this emigration.
During the Second World War, expanded war production drew many of the nation’s farmers and farm workers into cities and into basic industry. At the same time, agricultural production was undergoing a rapid growth, and growers feared that the elimination of the large surplus labor pool in the countryside would drive up wages and create conditions more favorable to unionization of agricultural labor. This led to a negotiated contract between the Mexican government and the United States under which the Roosevelt administration contracted for the importation of Mexicano workers to fill the needs of American agribusiness. The Bracero Program, as the contract was named, legally brought nearly half a million Mexicans into the U.S. to work on the farms at slave wages, plus a special consignment of 80,000 to work on the section gangs and maintenance crews of the railroads. Between 1943 and 1947, the U.S. government shelled out a total of $120 million to the Mexican government in payment for the Mexicano labor. This program was not officially ended until 1964.
Racist immigration practices are not new; they have been a constant element in American history since the first shipload of Black slaves arrived. They have intensified during every period of social and economic crisis in the United States. Historically, Mexican immigration, unlike European immigration, has been used by the U.S. rulers as a source of temporary cheap labor—to be encouraged when the labor market is tight and more hands are needed in order to keep the wage levels down; to be deported to the Mexican side of the border when jobs are scarce. The capitalists also use spectacular massive deportations of workers who are no longer needed as a way of fostering racist and xenophobic attitudes. They try to make it look as if the Mexicanos without papers are the cause of unemployment, and the government is helping to alleviate the economic difficulties of American workers. Chicanos and other Latinos are harassed in these racist dragnet raids, whether or not they are citizens.
Today, the capitalists attempt to paint a picture of hordes of Mexicans swooping across the border to steal American jobs. The bourgeois media publish article after article claiming these undocumented workers; end up on welfare, receive unemployment benefits, use public hospitals, put their children in local schools, and take advantage of other social services, thus burdening “citizen” workers with heavier taxes. The lies of this racist campaign are exposed by the facts. For example, a study by the INS reveals that of nearly 200,000 Mexicanos working without visas, who were apprehended in 1975, 132,000 made less than $2.50 an hour, and most were working in the fields. When the bosses were offered unemployed U.S. workers at the guaranteed minimum wage to replace the deported “illegals,” the most common response was hearty laughter. While the “illegal” workers are forced to pay taxes, they receive virtually none of the benefits, such as social security, unemployment compensation, and social services. The “illegal” is clearly the victim of economic injustice, not the cause.
Deportations have escalated to monstrous proportions over the last five years, with almost daily raids by la migra into the Chicano barrios. In addition to the deportations, the U.S. Congress is considering a variety of bills designed to infringe further on the rights of these workers as well as those of Chicanos. The Rodino bill would fine employers who “knowingly hire” workers without papers and empower the U.S. attorney general to issue citizenship identification papers for employers’ use. This would be a step toward the introduction of internal passports which Chicanos and others of Latin American descent would have to produce in order to get a job. These legislative proposals simply provide one more excuse for racists to deny employment to Chicanos. They are a major threat to the civil liberties of all American citizens.
Along with racist hiring and layoff practices, the bosses’ policies on “illegals” are supported by much of the trade union bureaucracy. The AFL-CIO is officially on record in favor of the deportation of undocumented workers, who are supposedly taking jobs away from Americans. The demands by labor officials to deport workers without papers are a coverup for their refusal to organize and lead a fight in defense of the living standards of all workers. As it becomes clearer to the ranks of the trade unions that such policies do not protect even existing jobs and living standards, increasing numbers of workers will begin to see a need to fight to change the reactionary anti-working-class policies of the labor bureaucracy and install a class-struggle perspective and leadership in its stead.
International labor solidarity is fundamental to unifying and defending the entire working class, its gains, and its organizations. The right to move freely back and forth across the border, the right to work in the United States when and where one chooses, without fear of harassment because of lack of work papers or immigration documents, is one of the demands at the very heart of the Chicano movement.
Struggles by Chicano workers both on the job and as part of the broad Chicano movement will play a key role in helping to reverse the class-collaborationist and racist positions of the current misleaders of the American labor movement and mobilize a mass movement of the Chicano people and their allies to halt the deportations. A mass antideportation movement that could organize actions in defense of Mexicanos and other immigrants without visas has the potential of drawing in not only Chicanos, other workers, civil libertarians, and students, but of mobilizing workers without papers in defense of their rights.
3. Education
The racist and inferior education Chicanos receive in U.S. schools aids the bosses in maintaining a large section of Chicano workers as part of the reserve pool of low-cost labor. Above all, suppression of the Spanish language is used to reinforce general racist policies and to perpetuate the unequal status of Chicanos in American society.
The education meted out to Chicanos guarantees that a large proportion of the Chicano population cannot speak, write, or read well in either English or Spanish. Lack of proficiency in the English language is then used to deny Chicanos better-paying jobs, and to justify the disproportionate joblessness among Chicanos, the miserable housing and wretched living conditions they are forced to suffer. Moreover, by promoting the English language and Euro-American culture as superior to the language and culture of Chicanos, the rulers foster chauvinist sentiments among Anglo workers. Chicanos are portrayed as un-American, deserving what they get because they are unwilling to learn English.
Even the federal government’s civil rights commission estimates that more than five million American students are in need of special language programs. The majority of these are Chicano and Puerto Rican youth. This lack of adequate bilingual-bicultural education results in a high push out rate for Chicano students. More than 40 percent of those who enter the first grade never graduate from high school. Compared with 12.0 school years completed by whites, the median is 8.1 for Chicanos.
This situation has given rise to massive struggles by Chicanos for equal education. When thousands of Chicano high school students in East Los Angeles launched strikes in their schools in the blowouts of 1968, they demanded “Education, Not Eradication!” This demand captured the deep desire of Chicano students for an education that touches the history of Chicanos, that respects their culture, language, and heritage, and that isn’t designed to force Chicanos to assimilate into Anglo society and culture.
In the last decade, legal challenges, combined with militant action by Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Chinese parents and students, have scored important victories in the fight for bilingual-bicultural education. The most significant was the January 1974 Supreme Court ruling, Lau v. Nichols, declaring that failure to provide bilingual programs to students with little or no proficiency in English is a denial of equal educational opportunity under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The decision was based on a suit filed by Chinese parents in San Francisco. It came nearly three decades after the First Regional Conference on Education of Spanish-speaking People in the Southwest, which recommended an end to segregated schools for Chicano children, improved teacher training, and better methods in teaching English.
The legal right to bilingual education established by the Lau decision can have the same significance for Chicanos in their fight for equal education as the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation has for the Black community.
The fight to fully implement bilingual-bicultural education, like the struggle to enforce desegregation of the schools, is unfolding in the face of racist attacks and budget cuts, which are axing existing programs. The meaning of the Lau decision has recently been challenged by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in an attempt to retreat from the establishment of bilingual education as a right that the government must provide. But the racist offensive against Chicano rights to equal education has begun to generate a response by Chicanos in Denver, Tucson, Dallas, and elsewhere.
Chicanos, like Blacks and other oppressed national minorities, are front-line victims of de facto segregation in American society. There is a long history of Chicano struggles against segregation, not only in education, but in housing and public facilities. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Chicano organizations such as the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC), the Alianza Hispano-Americano, and the American Council of Spanish-speaking People engaged in numerous court battles to secure legal equality.
On February 5, 1944, following a local struggle, a federal court in California ruled that Mexican-Americans’ rights to equal protection under the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment were being abridged because they were denied access to the only public swimming pool in San Bernardino, California. The court action waged by Chicano leaders set an important precedent that led to major challenges against segregated public facilities, especially the schools.
These and other court actions by Chicanos were successful in striking down local laws segregating Chicanos, and helped set the stage for the Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared “separate but equal” to be unconstitutional. They also led to another important high court decision the same year. The American Council of Spanish-speaking People had brought suit to reverse the conviction of a Texas Chicano, Pete Hernandez, for murder, by an all-white jury. The Supreme Court ruled that Hernandez had been denied a fair trial, and recognized Mexican-Americans as an identifiable ethnic group that suffered systematic discrimination in Texas. These victories, together with the Lau decision in 1974, provide the constitutional framework of the struggle against de facto segregation and for equal education, including struggles for bilingual-bicultural education.
Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, and others who have the right to bilingual programs are fighting to implement the law by establishing bilingual-bicultural education programs that teach all basic subjects in Spanish or their primary language with teachers who are bilingual and respect the culture and heritage of the students, and administrative staffs that are sensitive to the needs of Chicanos and other oppressed minorities. In order to win these programs, Chicanos often have to mobilize even to maintain existing bilingual programs, and the right to attend any school of their choice—including the better-equipped and better-staffed schools in the Anglo communities.
In a cynical attempt to pit Blacks and Chicanos against each other in their fight for equal education, and thus cut across effective collaboration in the struggle for their rights, the capitalist-dominated courts and school boards in a number of cities have consciously devised desegregation busing plans that would destroy existing bilingual-bicultural programs. This has helped to reinforce fears among some Chicanos that busing means an end to whatever gains they have registered in their fight for equal education. Many activists correctly understand that education in the United States is racist to the core, but view busing as the rulers’ way of trying to “integrate” Chicanos into schools and a society that will destroy their culture, heritage, and language.
The fight for bilingual-bicultural education and Chicano control over the schools in the Chicano community need not be counterposed to school desegregation through busing. Unfortunately, some Chicano activists have fallen into the trap set by the ruling class to prevent an effective united struggle by all victims of racist education on all fronts.
What is involved, both in struggles for Black and Chicano community control and the fight to keep the buses rolling, is the right of the communities of the oppressed nationalities to decide for themselves how and by what means they will achieve equality in education. The struggle to desegregate the schools through busing and the fight to maintain and extend bilingual-bicultural education are parts of the same battle and against the same enemy. This is the racist capitalist system, which systematically denies equal education to Chicanos, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and other oppressed national minorities in order to keep them superexploited.
Where the Chicano community decides that in order to secure equal education they want their children bused to the better schools in all-Anglo communities, demands must be raised to assure that the bilingual-bicultural programs not be eliminated, but expanded, and continue to be available to Chicano students in their new schools, regardless of the numbers of Chicanos being bused.
In other cases, the Chicano community may decide to fight for massive funding of schools in their community in order to bring those schools up to the standards of the best schools and to assure adequate bilingual-bicultural, and other special programs, as well as the hiring of sufficient trained personnel to administer such programs.
In Denver, for example, racist forces lined up against court-ordered busing and the court’s instructions to immediately implement bilingual-bicultural education in the schools. Antiracist forces in the Chicano and Black communities joined forces in an effort to beat back racist attacks on both of these provisions of the court’s order. They fought the racists’ attempts to divide the movement when the racists were successful in getting the court to remove the bilingual-bicultural provision from the court order. The united antiracist forces continued to demand implementation of bilingual-bicultural programs, as well as an end to segregated education in Denver.
Chicanos are also faced with dwindling opportunities for a college education. Budget cutbacks and tuition hikes affect Chicano and other minority students most because, in order to attend college, they are forced to rely more on financial aid and scholarship programs. They also need special education programs to help make up for the inferior education Chicanos get in the public schools. Gains that were won in the early 1970s, such as increased admissions to colleges and universities, the establishment of Chicano studies departments, and the hiring of more Chicano professors and administrators, are in danger of being wiped out.
The Chicano movement and other antiracist forces have begun to respond to attacks on bilingual-bicultural education, desegregation, and education budgets. Actions like those in Boston on December 14, 1974, and May 17, 1975, organized to defend the desegregation forces in that embattled city provide important examples of the kind of response Chicanos can organize with others. The National Student Coalition Against Racism, which played a central role in building the May 17 Boston action, has also been instrumental in drawing together, in cities like San Diego, San José, and Denver, those forces willing to fight against police terror in the Chicano community as well as for bilingual-bicultural education and other rights.
As the crisis of capitalism deepens and the racist assault on Chicano rights escalates, it is increasingly clear that concessions won in the past are not permanent. They were wrung out of the capitalists largely as a result of powerful mass actions by Chicanos, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans demanding their rights. Similar actions are necessary in order to defend these gains if Chicanos are to win further advances.
Chicano workers have a proud history in trade union battles and in struggles against discrimination on the job. They played a leading role in the battles that unionized the powerful western mining industry. They participated in strikes and demonstrations to organize the rail industry, and were a powerful component of other union struggles in the Southwest. They often paid with their blood for their efforts as the employers, aided by the capitalist government, deported and repatriated thousands of Mexicano and Chicano workers, including those whose families had lived in the Southwest for generations. Nine of the eighteen victims of Rockefeller’s 1914 Ludlow massacre were Chicanos.
This militant heritage has not been lost, as Chicano workers today continue to fight for a better standard of living and their full rights on the job and in the unions.
The great bulk of the Chicano work force is employed in such basic industries as steel, auto, mining, railroads, meat packing, electrical, transportation, garment, construction, and agriculture. Chicanos are disproportionately confined to the least skilled, poorest-paying job categories in all of these industries.
The weakness of the organized labor movement throughout the entire Southwest holds down the living standards of all workers. A key challenge that confronts the labor movement today is the need to organize the large numbers of unorganized workers. A significant portion of these nonunionized workers in the Southwest are Chicano.
The garment industry provides an instructive example. Chicanas and Mexicanas are the basic work force in the thousands of sweatshops that dot major southwestern cities. Their working conditions are scandalous, and they often receive wages below the federal minimum standard. These workers naturally turn to the unions as the only organizations that can help them fight for better hours and working conditions, and higher living standards. The two-year strike against the sweatshops of Willie Farah and the boycott of his products offer testimony to this.
The majority-Chicano work force in the Farah pants factories in Texas went out on stake in 1972 to win the basic right to union recognition. Intimidation and harassment did not stop the organizing effort. Taking their cue from the campesinos, the garment workers launched a national boycott of Farah pants, appealed to the Chicano community for support and solidarity in the strike and boycott, as well as to students and other potential allies. In 1974, largely as a result of the publicity generated by the boycott, the broad support the workers won for their struggle, and the economic damage the boycott did to Farah, the strike ended in victory. The Farah strike and boycott reflect the deep impact Chicano nationalism has had on Chicano workers.
One indication of the effects of racism inside the labor movement is the fact that while Chicanos comprise more than 30 percent of the steelworkers’ union membership in eleven western states, and a large percentage of the steelworkers in the Midwest, there are virtually no high Chicano elected officials in the United Steelworkers. The same discrimination prevails in the United Auto Workers, where Chicanos comprise as much as one-third of the membership in the UAW district encompassing California, Utah, and Arizona.
The Mexican-American Union Council (MAUC) and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) are examples of emerging organizations led by Chicano unionists. MAUC is comprised primarily of Chicano steelworkers in Los Angeles, and the LCLAA is made up of lower-level Chicano union functionaries from various AFL-CIO unions, the United Auto Workers, and Teamsters. The LCLAA, set up by the AFL-CIO officialdom, is mainly working to organize Chicano unionists to vote for the Democratic Party. However, it has also been forced to pressure the AFL-CIO bureaucracy for more jobs and union positions for Chicanos. The LCLAA has also put some distance between itself and the Meany bureaucracy’s reactionary position demanding deportation of undocumented workers. LCLAA supports legislation that calls for a moratorium on deportations.
Chicano unionists more and more often find themselves obliged to take up the social and political issues most affecting the oppressed. The Chicano caucus of the National Education Association, for example, joined with antiracist forces in Denver in 1975 to fight attacks on bilingual-bicultural education, desegregation, and affirmative action in hiring of Chicano and Black education personnel.
These same social and political issues are posed for the entire labor movement, and the struggles of Chicano unionists will be an important factor in educating the union ranks on the interrelationship between the labor movement and these social struggles. They will help to teach other unionists why labor must take up the social, political, and economic demands that Chicanos and other doubly oppressed sectors of the working class are pressing today, if the labor movement as a whole is to effectively counter the divisive tactics of the bosses and organize itself against the capitalist offensive.
The present leadership of the trade unions is the major obstacle to this process. It is a narrow-minded, conservative, racist, and precapitalist bureaucracy that subordinates the needs of the working class to the rulers’ attempts to maintain class peace. In fighting to turn their unions into instruments of struggle that defend the interests of all workers, instead of a dwindling number of jobs for a few temporarily more fortunate individuals, the union ranks will discover that the class-collaborationist policies of the current union bureaucracy must be replaced with a policy of militant struggle by the working class on all social, political, and economic fronts. A new union leadership, committed to such a class-struggle course, will emerge in the battles to come.
Struggles by Chicano workers, along with those of other superexploited layers of the working class, will play a vanguard role in this process of developing class and political consciousness in the labor movement, and educating broad layers of workers to think about and act on broader social issues, placing them in a new political context. The disproportionately high layoffs of Chicanos, their continued concentration in the lowest-paying jobs, their lack of representation in decision-making bodies of the unions, and the impact of Chicano nationalism on Chicano workers serve to deepen their class and political consciousness. The struggles by farm workers, the fight for equal education, actions against deportations, and fights for Chicano community control have brought increasing numbers of Chicano workers into motion against their national oppression and class exploitation. Socialist ideas, mass action in the streets, and the need for political answers to the problems confronting the working class seem reasonable to many Chicano workers today. Initiatives in the direction of independent Chicano political action by the Raza Unida parties have helped to break some Chicano workers away from the Democratic Party and educate a layer of Chicano workers on the need for political independence of the entire working class from the political representatives of its capitalist exploiters. The fact that predominantly Chicano union locals of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Amalgamated Meat Cutters, International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, Retail Clerks, and Service Employees International Union in San Antonio endorsed a Raza Unida Party candidate for state legislature in 1974 is an indication of developments that will take place if a mass independent Chicano political party begins to emerge. The accomplishments of the Crystal City Raza Unida Party have inspired Chicano workers throughout Texas and provide a concrete example on a local scale of what can be achieved through independent Chicano political action.
Such developments are also an indication of the kind of response an independent party of labor would evoke. Such a party, basing itself on the organized union movement and putting forward a program of struggle in the interests of the entire class and its allies, would find an immediate base of support among the most militant and conscious Chicano unionists, who would play a key role in its construction and in charting its direction.
The fifteen-year long organizing drive by the United Farm Workers union has inspired the entire Chicano movement to fight for justice, and has provided an example to the entire labor movement. Despite its limitations, it has indicated the direction in which the trade unions must move if they are to become transformed into popular organizations of class struggle.
Though a minority of the Chicano work force are employed as agricultural workers, the struggles of farm workers have been and will continue to occupy an important place in the fight for Chicano liberation. The farm workers’ movement arose in the midst of a deepgoing radical ferment in the United States and emerged in response to the wretched lot of the majority-Chicano and -Mexicano farm labor force in the Southwest.
Cries of Justicia! and Huelga! have echoed in California and Texas fields for decades. The chant of the campesinos, ˇSi, se puede!—yes, we can!—expresses the burning commitment of the farm workers to their struggle for justice and their understanding of the challenge before them.
To appreciate the significance of this movement it must be examined in the context of the difficulties in organizing this superexploited sector of the work force. There are three million agricultural workers in the United States. All past attempts to organize farm workers have been brutally crushed. The mechanization and industrialization of agricultural production over the last thirty-five years have transformed the American farm into the most advanced monopoly agribusiness in the world. Organizing these new factories in the fields poses a different and more difficult challenge than organizing a factory within four walls. These problems are aggravated by the increasingly migratory and seasonal character of the agricultural work force.
The drive by the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO, beginning in the mid-1960s, is the most successful organizing effort to date. What differentiates the UFW’s efforts from those in the past is its appeal to the nationalist consciousness of the Chicano and Mexicano farm workers, and the character of its drive as a social movement, taking up the many different aspects of oppression affecting the farm workers. La causa became the watchword for Chicanos fighting for their rights both in the fields and in the urban barrios. In turn, the resurgence of Chicano nationalism reinforces the fight of the farm workers.
When the California grape growers were forced to sign contracts with the UFW in 1970, it was not only a landmark victory for the thousands of campesinos who finally won benefits most industrial workers already enjoyed, but a signal gain for the Chicano people as a whole. This victory was the result of the massive support organized by the UFW through its international grape boycott, which mobilized tens of thousands of Chicanos, unionists, students, and others to force the growers to come to terms with the UFW. In its battle against the wealthy growers, the UFW had to take up the social and political oppression of the farm workers, in addition to their economic exploitation in the fields. It had to look beyond the fields and mobilize its allies among Chicanos and other oppressed and exploited sectors of the population. In doing so, even in a limited way, the UFW leadership transcended the narrow vision of the AFL-CIO officialdom.
If the organizing effort is to be ultimately victorious, the UFW needs to deepen these activities. The farm workers are faced with major obstacles, including many of the same ones that spelled defeat for past organizing efforts. They are up against some of the most powerful monopolies in the world, actively supported by the capitalist government.
At the same time, the UFW is, confronted with the shameless strikebreaking activity of the corrupt Teamster bureaucracy, and the unwillingness of the AFL-CIO leadership to back their verbal support for the UFW with the necessary aid to insure a durable victory for the campesinos.
The UFW has suffered severe blows since 1970. Along with the struggle in the grape fields, the UFW was on a drive to organize California lettuce workers. With the aid and collaboration of the top leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who signed sweetheart contracts behind the backs of striking lettuce workers, the growers began a campaign against the lettuce workers, forcing the UFW to launch a national boycott of head lettuce in 1971.
This was but a preview of a concerted campaign to destroy the UFW. In 1973, the Teamster bureaucracy’s alliance with the growers was cemented when they signed sweetheart contracts with grape growers who had refused to renew contracts with the UFW. In response to this outrageous union-busting drive, the UFW called a strike in the grape fields and launched a new nationwide grape boycott in an effort to bring massive public pressure to bear on the growers. The striking farm workers were met with brutal violence by sheriffs’ deputies, right-wing vigilantes, and thugs hired by the Teamster leadership. In the summer of 1973, thousands of UFW strikers were arrested and jailed, and pickets were harassed and beaten by goons and cops. The violence culminated in the murder of two striking farm workers in mid-August.
Hit by this murderous repression in the fields and a rapidly dwindling strike fund, the UFW leadership retreated, calling off the picketing in the fields in the fall of 1973. The AFL-CIO Executive Council, which had donated $1.6 million to the union to carry out its strike in the spring of that year, failed to come through with further financial support. The UFW fell back on the boycott as its main weapon, as striking workers fanned out across the country to beef up boycott staffs.
The campaign to crush them took a heavy toll on the fledgling union. By the fall of 1973, the UFW held only a handful of the original 160 grape contracts it had won in 1970, and its membership fell to less than one-sixth of the 60,000 farm workers previously represented under UFW contracts.
Material support from the powerful trade union federation has been provided with an eyedropper. Meany and the other misleaders in the AFL-CIO have no desire to see a union of the type that the UFW is organizing because such a union poses a direct challenge to them. It is an example to the ranks of the AFL-CIO of the kind of trade union action necessary to defend and advance the interests of the working class today. Thus, the AFL-CIO officialdom has spent more time trying to pressure the UFW to shed its militant social approach to organizing farm workers in favor of the more “businesslike” ways of the AFL-CIO leadership than it has in aiding the embattled UFW. They have worked especially hard to get the UFW to adopt the AFL-CIO’s scandalous stance in support of deportations.
The Chávez leadership has on occasion capitulated to this pressure. In the midst of the violent attacks on the UFW by growers and their Teamster collaborators in 1974, Chávez called for the deportation of Mexicano farm workers who were being used by the growers as strikebreaking scabs. The effect of Chavez’s campaign was to focus attention on a section of the campesinos as a supposed obstacle in the way of a UFW victory, instead of aiming the union’s fire at the growers, the government which supports them, and the collusion of the Teamster bureaucracy’s thugs.
This scandalous error cost the union vital support among Chicanos and others and was unpopular in the ranks of the UFW. It cut into support for the union in the fields themselves, where Mexicanos with and without immigration visas look to the UFW as their voice. The prodeportation position of Chavez and other UFW leaders rapidly proved itself an obstacle to their goals. In the 1975 union representation elections provided for by the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), the growers and the Teamsters used immigration laws to deport hundreds of UFW supporters in an attempt to halt UFW victories in the elections.
Fortunately, this disastrous position of the UFW leadership was reversed at the union’s 1975 convention, when the UFW announced that as long as the growers brought Mexicano workers into the fields to exploit them the UFW would organize them. In the elections in the fields they actively sought the support of undocumented workers; fought to defend them against la migra, the growers, and the Teamster officialdom’s goons; and have won their support.
The passage of the ALRA in the summer of 1975 opened up a new stage in the UFW’s efforts to organize farm labor. Against enormous odds in the elections, ranging from terror and intimidation tactics to outright fraud in the elections, the UFW out-polled the Teamsters two-to-one. These successes demonstrate the viability of la causa and indicate the deep roots that the UFW has among campesinos. The elections prove without a doubt that the UFW is the authentic voice of California’s superexploited agricultural laborers.
The inspiration that campesinos throughout the United States have gained from the victories of the UFW in California has led to similar organizing efforts in Texas, Ohio, and parts of the East Coast. Although the UFW leadership has given little support to these efforts and tends to see them as detracting from the current drive in California, the UFW’s continued existence in the face of powerful opposition, and its character as a social movement have provided the basic impulse to all these organizing efforts.
What agricultural workers need is one union that encompasses all campesinos on a national scale. Support to the UFW’s boycott and organizing efforts, as well as other efforts of farm workers from Ohio to Texas and from Florida to New Jersey, can be a step to building such a united union.
The struggle in California’s fields is far from over. The growers, and the capitalist parties that serve them, are out to crush the UFW, with help from the Teamster officialdom. They will concede nothing to the UFW without fighting every step of the way. California Democrats and Republicans have moved, on the growers’ behalf, to nullify the hard-fought UFW victories in the union representation elections by cutting off funds for the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB), the body set up to conduct the elections and insure that the results are respected.
These maneuvers by the Democratic and Republican parties point to a central contradiction in the current UFW leadership. While the UFW’s strength is the union’s roots in the Chicano community and its appeal to the broad masses of American people as a social movement, the leadership’s continued support to the Democratic Party that represents the growers’ interests, not theirs, remains a glaring weakness of the UFW leaders. The illusion that California governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., has the best interests of the UFW and the campesinos at heart is a deadly trap. The Democratic Party is tied hand and foot to agribusiness, not only in California, but nationally. Relying on this capitalist party is an obstacle to securing the gains the UFW won during its fifteen years of struggle and to registering further progress in the drive to organize the nation’s three million agricultural workers.
In addition to strike actions in the fields, the UFW has utilized the boycott as a primary weapon. At the same time, its leaders have looked to “friendly” politicians, such as Brown, for help. Because they have placed so much confidence in these politicians, their ability to organize a broad and effective boycott and other mass actions is hampered. One example of this is the way the Chavez leadership responded to attacks by the California legislature on the farm labor law in spring 1976.
When the state legislature, with the collusion of California liberal Democrats, was strangling the bill to appropriate funds for the continued functioning of the ALRB, the UFW announced that it would put an initiative on the ballot to get California voters to pass such a bill. However, because UFW leaders were hoping that Brown and other leaders of the Democratic Party in California, who supposedly support the UFW, would get the proposition on the ballot for them, they postponed the petitioning drive week after week. Only when it became painfully clear that
the UFW had been sold out by these “friends” in Sacramento did they begin petitioning to place the proposition on the ballot.
The UFW leadership’s illusions in politicians like Brown hamper their ability to build a strong and effective boycott movement. Moreover, it leads the campesinos to place totally unjustified confidence in these capitalist politicians. Brown, who has tried to build his reputation in the national Democratic Party on the basis of his ability to bring “peace” to California’s embattled fields, has continued to make speeches about his support to appropriations for the farm labor bill. At the same time, the Democratic speaker of the assembly, Leo McCarthy, has been actively working to throttle the ALRA. Now Brown has appointed McCarthy his campaign manager in his bid for the presidency. Chávez correctly attacks McCarthy for his role in trying to break the back of the farm labor bill, but has remained silent about Brown’s! intimate collaboration with McCarthy.
To the extent that the UFW leadership subordinates the mass action side of the UFW’s struggle to reliance on “progressive” capitalist politicians like Brown, UFW victories in the fields and the effectiveness of the boycott will be undercut. A policy of class struggle in the fields and class collaboration in Sacramento can only be self-defeating.
The union must move to mobilize in action that huge reservoir of support and sympathy it has in the fields, in the Chicano community, on the campuses, within the trade unions, in the churches, and among other oppressed nationalities. Cutting loose from any policy of reliance on the Democratic Party and its politicians is a prerequisite for consciously developing and implementing such a perspective. Such a step would set a powerful example for the entire Chicano movement and would shake the current leadership of the trade union movement to its foundations.
The inspiration the UFW has already provided to the struggling masses would greatly increase, as would the chances for survival and progress of the United Farm Workers union itself.
These problems of political strategy and perspective are not restricted to the UFW. The same issues are posed for the entire labor movement and Chicano movement. The labor bureaucracy’s long-standing policy of giving support to the political parties of the bosses and the resultant absence of any independent political voice of the working class is the central historic default of the American labor movement up to the present time.
The two-party system is the way the capitalist ruling class maintains its monopoly over the country’s political life. The ruling rich own and control the Democratic and Republican parties, which are equally committed to preserving the capitalist system and its evils of war, racism, and exploitation. As one party begins to be discredited in the eyes of working people the other steps in for a while, pretending to offer something new. Then they trade back again. And so the runaround goes.
The illusion is deliberately fostered that the working class and the oppressed nationalities can win reforms and improve their condition by supporting their “friends” in these parties, or withholding support from their enemies. But reliance on either party facilitates the ruling class aim of diffusing and co-opting independent struggles of the masses, subordinating them to the needs of the capitalist system.
To advance its own goals the working class must break from the capitalist parties and steer a course of political independence. Its mass actions must be independent of these parties—not dependent on funds or favors from them, not concerned about embarrassing them, and not subordinated to getting them elected. Independent political action means putting nothing ahead of the demands and interests of the working class, the oppressed national minorities, women, and other victims of capitalism’s degradation.
In order to break the two-party vise, the working class needs to form its own political party to give direction and reinforcement to its struggles and to pose the question of a different class governing society. A mass revolutionary workers’ party is needed to lead the struggle to replace the capitalist rulers and establish a workers’ government.
A giant step in this direction would be the formation of a labor party based on the organized power of the unions. This should not be a labor version of the Democratic and Republican parties or a vote-catching machine for up-and-coming “labor politicians.” It should be a new type of party that strengthens the independent mobilization of all sectors of the oppressed and helps aim their force at the common enemy.
This strategic question of independent working class political action is posed with special acuteness for Chicanos, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans. These oppressed nationalities are overwhelmingly working class in composition. They have been victimized by many decades of concerted attempts by the ruling class to exclude them from the political life of this country. In the last decade and a half this has led to several attempts at the formation of independent Black or Chicano political parties. The growth of any such party would be a significant step forward in winning the democratic rights of Chicano or Black political representation. It would also be a big step toward breaking with the political parties of the oppressors and charting a course of independent working class political action. The Raza Unida parties that have grown out of Chicano struggles are the most advanced expression of this kind to be found in the United States today.
The native Mexican inhabitants of the Southwest were forcibly and violently displaced from the land they once owned by the expansion and consolidation of U.S. capitalism. In the crucible of ascending American imperialism a distinct oppressed nationality was forged. This process entailed the systematic denial of political rights to the second class Chicano citizens of the Southwest. In part this was accomplished by the open use of terror. Like Blacks in the South, Chicanos knew that attempts to utilize their political rights could cost them their lives or livelihoods.
The victories of the Black civil rights struggles brought some changes for Chicanos too. However, even with the enforcement of formal political guarantees, the use of English as the only legal political language served to effectively prevent Chicanos from exercising their rights and restricted their participation in the political life of the country.
This fact was finally recognized even by the U.S. Congress in 1975 when the 1965 Voting Rights Act was extended for another ten years and broadened by making bilingual elections mandatory in districts where more than 5 percent of the voters do not speak English.
The fight of Chicanos for political representation has generated numerous struggles over the years. However, until very recently virtually all attempts; at political activity have been channeled through the Democratic Party. For example, organizations like the Mexican-American Political Association (MAPA) in California and the Political Association of Spanish-speaking Organizations (PASO) in Texas were established in the late 1950s for the purpose of pressing the Democratic Party into addressing itself to the needs of Chicanos. MAPA and PASO register Chicanos to vote, organize the Chicano vote for the Democrats, and seek to get Chicano Democrats elected to public office. Those Chicanos who go to the polls vote in their great majority for the Democratic Party.
While there has been a slight increase in the number of Chicanos elected to office, Chicanos are still miserably under-represented on all governmental levels. An example is Los Angeles County, where well over one million Chicanos reside. The first Chicano congressperson from this area was elected in 1962, 112 years after California gained statehood. There is no Chicano representation on the fifteen-member Los Angeles city council, and no Chicano has ever been elected to the powerful five-member L.A. County Board of Supervisors. This latter body administers East Los Angeles, the largest Chicano barrio in the country. In three special elections the Democratic Party machine in Los Angeles County has successfully stymied efforts to incorporate the area into a separate city.
Over the last decade, faced with rising Chicano militancy, the Democratic Party has stepped up its efforts to hold on to the Chicano vote. One reflection of this was the election in 1974 of two Chicano governors—for the first time in history. The fact that there has been an increase, however slight, of Chicano elected officials in the last decade is a token of the deepening nationalist consciousness among Chicanos and an expression of their desires to be represented in the political arena by their own people.
However, the election of Chicano Democrats does not represent a form of independent political action. On the contrary, it is a way of perpetuating Chicano dependence on those who are responsible for the second class status of Chicanos and other oppressed sectors of the population.
Toward the end of the 1960s, deepening disillusionment with the Democratic Party led a layer of Chicano militants to break from the perspective of working inside this party and move toward organizing independent political formations. The concept of independent Chicano political action was first discussed and debated on a national scale at the National Chicano Youth Liberation conferences held in 1969 and 1970 in Denver, Colorado. The conferences were called by the Denver Crusade for Justice, an urban civil rights and Chicano cultural organization that emerged in the mid-1960s. The Crusade’s central leader, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles, had been a Democratic Party functionary in Denver, but broke from the Democrats when he became convinced that such a party was incapable of responding to or fighting for the needs of Chicanos.
It was in the wake of the struggles of the 1960s and following these discussions and debates that the Raza Unida parties emerged, representing the most sustained attempts yet to develop Chicano political action. The Raza Unida parties also represent a step toward independent political action by the working class as a whole.
In order to have a real voice in American politics, the Chicano people need a mass party, organizationally and politically independent of the twin parties of capitalist rule. The kind of party Chicanos need would confront the capitalist class in the electoral arena by posing a nationalist and class alternative for Chicanos at the polls. But it would not only be an electoral tool. It could also mobilize and lead the Chicano masses in actions in the streets in order to press for their day-to-day needs—such as more and better jobs, decent housing, bilingual and bicultural education, a halt to racist deportations. Such a party, basing itself on a program and perspective of class-struggle action, could open the way for new alignments and alliances with other oppressed and exploited groups and prove an effective means of promoting and protecting the interests of Chicanos in the social, economic, and political arenas.
The development of such a mass independent Chicano political party would have a profound impact on American politics. It would, in fact, herald the doom of the capitalist two-party system. The Democrats rely heavily on votes from a combination of labor and the oppressed national minorities. If Chicanos were to turn away from the Democratic Party on a massive scale, it would significantly weaken the Democrats, particularly in the Southwest, where the Chicano vote is essential for Democratic Party victories. Unable to win, the Democratic Party coalition would shatter. The example set by a mass independent Chicano political party would be an inspiring lesson to Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and other working people, and encourage the development of independent political action on the part of labor and the Black and Puerto Rican communities.
A mass political party of this type does not yet exist. The various Raza Unida Party formations and the successes they have chalked up in their six years of existence have helped to deepen the understanding among Chicanos and others of the need to break from the Democratic Party. But while these parties are the most advanced forms of political organization yet to emerge in the Chicano struggle, their development has been limited and uneven. To understand some of the problems these small parties face, it is useful to look at the development of the Raza Unida parties in California, Colorado, and Texas.
California
The clearest example of the unevenness of the Raza Unida parties is the limited development and growth of the California parties, particularly the Raza Unida groupings in Los Angeles.
For the most part, parties in Fresno, San Diego, San José and Oakland exist only as paper organizations or as very small groupings. In general, the parties in these areas have not utilized the openings provided by elections to build a strong base among Chicanos, nor have they participated as parties in the concrete struggles of Chicanos :in their areas.
An example of this is the Oakland Raza Unida Party, which had a promising start in 1971-72. It elaborated a program which was an example for other Raza Unida parties to emulate and ran a Raza Unida Party slate in the 1971 elections. Through this and other activities, it won important support among Chicanos in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area.
The leaders of this Raza Unida formation came out of a militant struggle by Chicano and Latino students at Merritt College, a community college in Oakland. The student struggles won the establishment of Chicano and Latin American studies departments, as well as other programs for Chicano and Latino students. But after a successful start the Oakland Raza Unida Party leaders bent to the pressure of ultraleft and sectarian activists who were opposed to any participation in electoral activity with its implicit orientation to organizing the Chicano masses. The perspective of building an independent Chicano political party was abandoned.
In Los Angeles, the large size of the Chicano population opens broad opportunities for the construction of a powerful and effective independent Chicano political party. Such a development would have a profound impact on politics in that city, as well as the country as a whole. It could win significant support from Blacks and unionists—initially among Chicano unionists in particular who are active in the Chicano movement.
Despite this potential, the various Raza Unida Party groupings in Los Angeles are small and divided. In several local election campaigns run by Raza Unida Party groupings in Los Angeles, significant support was registered. The response to the RUP campaigns of Raul Ruiz for state assembly against a Chicano Democrat in 1972, and for city council in the special election for incorporation of East Los Angeles in 1974, indicated the sentiment among Chicanos for a party truly representing their interests in the political arena. Had East Los Angeles been incorporated into a separate city, it would have been the largest Chicano city in the country and Raul Ruiz, who outpolled Democrats in the race, would have been on the first city council.
Another indication of the sentiment for an independent Chicano party in Los Angeles is the development of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the Raza Unida Party. While the group is small, it has deep roots in the Chicano community of the valley and has carried out consistent activity in defense of Chicano rights on the job, in the schools, and other struggles in the community. It has also fielded candidates in local elections.
However, despite the extensive pro-Raza Unida Party sentiment that has already been demonstrated in California, no leadership has yet emerged that has been able to consolidate that support and start to build a mass party that organizes Chicanos to fight for their needs, using every avenue available.
Colorado
In Colorado, the Raza Unida Party was initiated and led by the Denver Crusade for Justice. The RUP in Denver was established in 1970, about the same time the party in Crystal City, Texas, was formed. The militant leaders of the Crusade, especially Corky Gonzáles, demonstrated the clearest understanding of the need for Chicano political action independent of the Democratic Party. They ran Chicano candidates against the Democrats and Republicans in local elections in 1970, and through this the concept of an independent Chicano political party got a broad hearing among Chicanos for the first time in Denver.
In the initial stages of its formation, the Colorado Raza Unida Party showed the greatest promise of developing into an important component of the future mass independent Chicano political party. Gonzáles and other Crusade leaders saw the need for this important question to be discussed and debated broadly in the Chicano movement on a national scale. The national Chicano Youth Liberation conferences in 1969, 1970, and 1971 in Denver provided an arena for rich discussion on the strategy of independent Chicano political action. Thousands of Chicanos from across the country participated.
The main base of the Colorado Raza Unida Party has always been in Denver, where the Crusade for Justice has had deep roots in the Chicano community. But by participating as an independent formation in statewide and county elections in 1972 and 1974, the party was able to extend its influence into southern Colorado, and established functioning chapters in Weld County and Pueblo, where there are sizable Chicano populations.
A weakness of the Colorado Raza Unida Party is that it has always been projected as the electoral instrument of the Crusade. This is an obstacle to winning large numbers of Chicanos to the Raza Unida banner because few are ready to make the kind of commitment of time and energy that the cadres of the Crusade make. Moreover, the Raza Unida Party does not participate as a party in the daily struggles of Chicanos in Denver and throughout the state. To the extent that activity around concrete demands being pressed by the Chicano community takes place, this is carried out by the Crusade. Thus the Raza Unida Party itself does not take the lead in organizing Chicanos in Denver to counter the racist offensive against bilingual-bicultural education, to fight for jobs; for Chicanos who are being hit hard with discriminatory layoffs, or to demand solutions to the many other problems confronting Chicanos today.
Differences over perspectives for building the Colorado Raza Unida Party and assuring its democratic functioning led to the disbanding of the Greeley Raza Unida grouping, the backbone of the Weld County RUP. Some of its key leaders have since become Maoists.
All of these political problems are exacerbated by the government repression that has come down hard on the Crusade in the last few years. The government’s stepped-up attacks began with the 1973 police assault on the Crusade’s school, Escuela Tlatelolco, in which one Chicano youth was murdered by the cops, and scores of others arrested on frame-up charges designed to make the victims into the criminals in the eyes of the public. Since 1973, a systematic campaign of harassment and intimidation has been carried out, forcing the Crusade and Raza Unida Party leaders to expend considerable time and resources fighting legal frame-ups ranging from traffic violations to bombing charges. The killings of six Raza Unida Party student activists in two 1974 bombing incidents in Boulder dramatized the murderous character of the government’s terror campaign.
The latest outrage was the arrest of Juan Haro in the fall of 1975. A key leader of the Raza Unida Party and cofounder of the Crusade for Justice, Haro was framed up, along with a young Crusade activist, on charges of conspiring to bomb a Denver police substation. The chief witness for the prosecution in the case was an informer and provocateur hired by the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau of the Treasury Department to infiltrate the Crusade. The direct complicity of the federal government in the conspiracy to discredit, isolate, and, if possible, destroy the Crusade and the Raza Unida Party in Denver is clear. The Chicano movement and its supporters must organize to force the government to open its files in order to uncover the truth about the victimization of the Crusade and other operations the capitalist government is carrying out to destroy the Chicano movement, or frame up its militants.
The attack on the Crusade and the Colorado Raza Unida Party is an attack on the entire Chicano movement. A mobilization of the Chicano community and its allies in defense of the Crusade is needed to force the government to halt the murderous drive against this Chicano organization.
An initiative by the Crusade to launch a broad defense committee open to all who want to help them fight back, regardless of political differences on other questions, would be a powerful rejoinder to the government’s attempts to isolate and destroy them. Texas
The survival of the Texas party, growing support for it throughout the state, and its accomplishments over the last six years offer the best testimony to the viability of the concept of an independent Chicano political party.
The Texas party emerged out of a militant Chicano student struggle led by MAYO in the small South Texas town of Crystal City. Crystal City is overwhelmingly Chicano, and the 1969 struggle by Chicano high school students protesting racist practices in their schools sparked a mobilization in the Chicano community and a fight to gain control over the schools in the town. The community organization set up to support the blowouts, Ciudadanos Unidos (United Citizens), formed the basic core of the Raza Unida Party, along with MAYO. Independent candidates were fielded for school board in 1970 and they won. The impact of the 1970 electoral victories inspired the growth of Raza Unida parties all over South Texas. In many towns, Chicanos comprise a majority of the population.
Since then, the Raza Unida parties have won elections for school board, city council, justice of the peace, mayor, and other city and county offices in a number of small South Texas towns.
Programmatically, these parties aspire to Chicano control of institutions in the Chicano community. In Crystal City, for example, the Raza Unida Party holds a majority of seats on the school board, city council, and several positions in Zavala County, of which Crystal City is the seat. In 1974, José Angel Gutierrez, a founder of the Crystal City RUP, was elected to a Zavala County judgeship. The Raza Unida Party-run Crystal City administration has instituted bilingual-bicultural programs and free school lunches, and hired Chicanos to replace racist teachers in Crystal City schools. When the Raza Unida Party candidates took office one of their first actions was to demand that the hated Texas Rangers get out of Crystal City and stay out. They recently waged a court battle against the major utility company that services Crystal City in an effort to halt a hike in gas and electric rates.
The Raza Unida city administration also aided Chicano workers in the Del Monte cannery—the major business in Crystal City—to set up their own union, Obreros Unidos Independientes (United Independent Workers), because the Teamsters local that supposedly represented them signed a contract with the boss behind the cannery workers’ backs.
Important as these gains have been, they also point up the severe limitations on what can be accomplished through gaining control of the city administration and schools in one or two towns, particularly small towns like Crystal City.
A limited amount can be changed through Raza Unida administration of city governments, especially those, like Crystal City, lacking in the financial resources necessary to institute meaningful changes in the lives of Chicanos. Crystal City itself is impoverished, as are most of the small towns in South Texas. The main power and wealth is in the hands of a few Anglo ranchers in Zavala County.
In order to significantly improve the depressed living conditions of Chicanos, Raza Unida Party city and county administrations have to rely on state and federal funds. To insure that these state and federal programs are tailored to the demands of Chicanos and administered by them, it is necessary to organize and mobilize the Chicano community to fight to force government financing of schools, jobs, housing, health care, child care, and other social programs necessary to improve the lot of Chicanos. To be effective, such a struggle has to be carried out on a scale beyond the local area and has to involve Chicanos and their allies across the Southwest to secure these gains.
However, many of the key leaders of the Texas Raza Unida Party have tended toward a one-sided view of what the Raza Unida Party can be. They limit their strategy to building viable chapters of the RUPs in those South Texas counties where Chicanos are a majority and can win electoral victories with the goal of becoming the local and county administration.
Raza Unida Party statewide electoral campaigns in 1972 and 1974 departed from this strategy and pointed the way forward in building the influence and mass base of the independent Chicano political party among the masses of Chicanos throughout Texas. These campaigns extended the Raza Unida parties into major urban centers where Chicanos represent a significant minority. They led to the establishment of Raza Unida Party chapters in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, El Paso, and Corpus Christi. These statewide RUP campaigns also began to win a hearing among some Black and labor organizations, and helped to popularize the concept of independent Chicano political action on a broad scale.
However, the Texas Raza Unida Party is still seen by some of its leaders and activists as simply an electoral party—a vote-winning machine. As a result, the Chicano political formations have tended to function as political parties only during elections. The RUP is not yet being built as a political party, organized on a year-round basis and doing more than running candidates in elections.
Because of the monopoly the Democratic and Republican parties have over the political life of the country, the American masses identify polities with elections, and view political parties as electoral machines, This concept is consciously perpetuated by the capitalist class.
The Chicano masses will look to the Raza Unida parties as their party only when they see these parties can lead them in their daily struggles. This will aid in deepening the consciousness among Chicanos of the need for more fundamental social change to end the racist oppression they suffer, and to seek allies that can help accomplish this.
Such an approach would mean that after the vote is in, time is spent in consolidating the support registered at the polls by projecting consistent activity to involve supporters of the Raza Unida Party. Mass activities carried out would be organized and led by the RUPs during elections and also when there is no election on the agenda. Currently, most of such activities involving RUP supporters are organized by Ciudadanos Unidos or Familias Unidas and other groups in Texas. Thus, outside of Zavala County, the Raza Unida Party has no public face between elections. To one degree or another, all the RUPs have had this same limitation.
The Raza Unida parties are trying to grapple with a very fundamental problem. How do you get from the initiating core of activists who are already convinced of the need to break from capitalist parties to a party that has the allegiance and active participation of the Chicano masses? How do you, at the same time, put forward and fight around a program of immediate, democratic, and transitional demands that can propel Chicanos into action against their oppression at all levels and attract growing numbers of allies?
There is no contradiction between putting forward a program of clear demands around the social, political, and economic oppression of Chicanos and winning the Chicano masses to the banners of the Raza Unida parties. To the contrary, the only way to build a powerful Chicano movement and a mass independent Chicano political party is precisely through fighting uncompromisingly around concrete demands that move Chicanos in the direction of mass anticapitalist mobilization, advancing them toward the goal of their liberation. Such actions also have the potential of forcing meaningful concessions from the government. Without projecting themselves as such a movement, the Raza Unida parties run the risk of losing their independent thrust or making errors that can isolate them from the masses of Chicanos.
The problem of political perspective in the Raza Unida parties was most clearly expressed in the months leading up to the 1972 National Raza Unida Parties convention held in El Paso, Texas. Prior to the convention, some RUP leaders argued for adoption of a strategy that could have transformed the RUPs into nothing more than a pressure group seeking concessions from the Democratic and Republican parties.
Differences over this strategy were never openly debated on the floor of the El Paso convention and remain unclarified. But the overwhelming majority of delegates at that convention took a stand reaffirming the independence of the Raza Unida parties from the two parties of capitalist rule. They refused to endorse either George McGovern or Richard Nixon in their presidential bids. This was an important test of viability which these parties passed.
While no one in the leadership of the Raza Unida parties is today arguing for a “pressure group” perspective and, in fact, the RUPs continue to remain independent from the Democratic and Republican parties, the danger still remains that these relatively small Chicano parties will find the increasing pressure from the capitalist parties overwhelming.
At the present time there is no organized wing or leading figure within the RUPs consciously attempting to bring these parties back into the Democratic Party. But until these parties develop a clear program of demands aimed at mobilizing the Chicanos in action to fight for their needs and aspirations, and until they go beyond an electoral perspective, there remains the danger of a drift back into the Democratic Party.
Another problem is related to this one. Many of the activists and leaders of the Raza Unida parties understand that Chicanos are a minority in American society and see the need to win allies to their struggles in order to register gains, not only in the electoral arena, but in the schools, the courts, the factories and workplaces, the unions, and elsewhere.
This was reflected in the 1974 Raza Unida gubernatorial campaign of Ramsey Muńiz in Texas. Muńiz and other Texas leaders looked to Blacks, labor, and others as natural allies for their campaign and tried to win support among these layers of the population. This was a very positive sentiment. However, some RUP activists and leaders thought that they could win these allies to support of the RUP campaign by ducking the question of the Chicano composition of the Raza Unida parties and by watering down the nationalist and class demands put forward in the past in response to Chicanos’ needs. When he spoke to Anglo audiences, for example, Muniz defined the Raza Unida Party as “United People’s Party.” Though this did not result in winning any significant Anglo support for the campaign, it served to confuse activists who have joined the Raza Unida Party or support it because they see it as the voice of Chicanos in the political arena.
Any Chicano party that addresses itself to the issues affecting Chicanos today will find it necessary, first and most of all, to elaborate a program of economic and social demands to win gains for Chicanos. Such a program will likewise be attractive to and win support from other working people and oppressed layers of the population who have the same problems. The Raza Unida parties are correct in appealing to allies of the Chicano people, but these allies are going to be won only if the RUP is able to rally some significant Chicano support to its banner.
The question of winning allies for the Chicano struggle is inseparable from the question of how to win the majority of Chicanos away from their capitalist exploiters in the political arena, and to a party that is not only their tribune in the elections, but leads Chicanos in struggle 365 days out of the year. There is no shortcut to politically winning the Chicano people to the banners of the RUPs. To do this, it is necessary to combine electoral activity with mass action in the streets. Moreover, the Raza Unida parties will have to actively involve their members in determining the direction and policies of the party. While organizations such as Ciudadanos Unidos and Familias Unidas in Texas, and the Crusade for Justice in Denver are valuable and important tools for winning support for the Raza Unida parties, they cannot substitute for broad participation in the decision-making process within the Raza Unida parties.
The Socialist Workers Party will continue to do everything possible to support the building of the Raza Unida parties as independent Chicano political organizations capable of advancing the Chicano liberation struggle. Not only does this mean giving active support to Raza Unida candidates who are clearly running independent from the capitalist parties, where appropriate; it means contributing our ideas and suggestions and participating in the discussion within the Chicano movement over all aspects of program and perspectives. It means helping to build the actions that can mobilize Chicanos in struggle—by the farm workers, steelworkers, women, students, antideportation forces, supporters of affirmative action.
It means presenting our revolutionary socialist ideas and perspectives through the election campaigns of the Socialist Workers Party, through the pages of the Militant, through Intercontinental Press, the bilingual weekly magazine of the Fourth International, through sales of the press of the Mexican Trotskyists, and through all our various activities.
In the early stages of the resurgence of Chicano nationalism, those who held that only a socialist revolution would bring about the total liberation of the Chicano people were a very small minority in the Chicano movement. Chicano revolutionary socialists often were forced to fight for their right to participate in Chicano movement organizations, and the right to present then-ideas in discussions of Chicano movement perspectives. A large majority of Chicano militants, who were new to radical politics, believed that revolutionary theories in general, and Marxism and Leninism in particular, were at best irrelevant to the struggle. Some Chicano leaders argued heatedly that Marxist ideas were in fact dangerous to Chicanos because they were “Anglo theories.”
However, a significant change has begun to take place in the last several years. There is widespread interest in socialist ideas, history, and perspectives among a growing number of Chicanos. At virtually every Chicano gathering in the last two years, there have been lively debates on the relevance of socialism to the struggles of Chicanos. Chicano militants, especially youth, are reading more revolutionary literature than at any time in the past. Increasing numbers of Chicano studies departments carry courses on Marxism and Chicano liberation, and invite socialists to address these and other classes. The newspapers and magazines of the Chicano movement carry more articles on socialism and the Chicano movement. Marxist study groups have been set up by some Chicano organizations, and many Chicanos participate in others. Socialist candidates and spokespeople are getting a broader hearing in the Chicano movement.
The discussions and debates that are going on within the Chicano movement pose new challenges and opportunities for the Socialist Workers Party. Chicano militants are weighing the merits of all the tendencies in the workers’ movement and are scrutinizing their programs and positions. The SWP has more opportunities than at any time in its history to present its program for socialism to Chicanos and win growing numbers of Chicanos to its ranks. It must be prepared to provide the answers and the education that Chicanos are seeking, not only on Chicano nationalism, but also on economic theory, and the whole range of Marxism that is the foundation of the SWP’s program.
The SWP unconditionally supports the Chicano struggle for self-determination. It believes that the development of Chicano nationalism is a positive step forward in the struggle for Chicano liberation. The SWP recognizes that the struggle of Chicanos against then- oppression takes place on two intertwined fronts—a fight against the oppression they face as a people, and a struggle against their exploitation as part of the working class. Only the coming American socialist revolution—a proletarian revolution that also completes the unfulfilled democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution by assuring equality and self-determination to the oppressed national minorities in the United States—can bring about the total liberation of Chicanos.
Understanding this combined character of the coming American revolution differentiates the SWP from every other tendency in the workers’ movement—the Stalinist Communist Party and Maoist sects, the social democrats, the sectarian leftists. The Socialist Workers Parity’s aim is to construct a mass revolutionary Leninist party that aspires to lead the working class and its allies to power to achieve both of these goals. The American working class has the momentous task of wresting state power from the most powerful ruling class on earth. The necessity of carrying out such a transformation is becoming clearer and clearer as the breakdowns and crises of the capitalist system spread. But to accomplish this task the working class will need something it does not yet have—its own mass revolutionary socialist party.
We are confident that explosive events will promote rapid changes in the political consciousness of the working class and lead to upsurges out of which a mass revolutionary socialist party can emerge. However, this can happen only if the cadres of this party are assembled beforehand around a clear perspective and program. This is what the Socialist Workers Party is doing.
Only a party that is deeply rooted in the working class, especially among its most oppressed sectors, can lead the American working class and its allies to power. This involves systematic work in all sectors of the mass movement to recruit the most capable fighters to the revolutionary party. There is no way that the working class can achieve its aims unless it brings together in a common fighting party and develops into revolutionary cadres the most resolute revolutionists of the working class and the best fighters from all the oppressed national minorities—Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Native American, and Asian-American.
As the nucleus of the future mass revolutionary socialist party, the SWP puts forward a program and perspective of struggle that can help mobilize Chicanos and all working people to fight for their interests. The working class cannot achieve its goals without the Chicano people and other nationally oppressed peoples achieving theirs.
The deepening contradictions of U.S. imperialism and the heavy burden this will place on the Chicano population will generate increased struggles in the period ahead. The SWP must be part of these straggles, rooting itself more deeply in the Chicano masses.
The SWP’s task is to win more Chicanos to the revolutionary socialist party and educate them as revolutionary cadres. The steps taken to establish new SWP units in San José, San Antonio, East Los Angeles, the Mission District of San Francisco, and other cities help facilitate the party’s work in organizing itself to meet new openings. The SWP’s ability to win increasing numbers of Chicano revolutionists will be a fundamental test of our capacities as a revolutionary party.
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