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Printed in Internal Discussion Bulletin, Socialist Workers Party, 1971.
Transcribed & marked up by Andrew Pollack for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The following historical sketch in intended only as a schematic overview of some of the main events which led to the forging of the Chicano people into a distinct oppressed nationality. Nor does it attempt to present a rounded analysis of major events such as the Mexican-American War. As such, it should not be viewed as a complete Marxist history of the Chicano people. That is yet to be written, and this is just one small step in that direction.
The Chicano people have their origins in the racial and cultural mixture of Spaniards with the native populations of what is now Mexico and the agricultural Pueblo Indians of what is now the southwestern part of the United States.
The Spanish conquest of Mexico beginning in 1519, and the exploration of what is now California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas predate the arrival of the Pilgrims by almost a century. By 1630 the Spanish had founded twenty-five missions and a series of settlements in New Mexico. From New Mexico settlements spread into Arizona and California. While Juan Bautista de Anza was exploring San Francisco Bay, the European colonists on the eastern seaboard were celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Between 1769 and 1823, the Spanish had established in California a string of twenty-one missions, four presidial towns (military garrisons), two pueblos (San José and Los Angeles), and a number of settlements in Texas and Arizona. By 1848 there were approximately 75,000 Spanish-speaking settlers (predominantly mestizos, people of Indian-Spanish stock) in these northern provinces of Mexico; 7,500 in California; 1,000 in Arizona; 60,000 in New Mexico; and 5,000 in Texas. There were approximately 250,000 native inhabitants in the same area.
While the British colonized the eastern seaboard with large numbers of settlers, the Spanish conquerors were few in number and predominantly male. The British drove the native population they encountered off the land. Later, as Anglo-American capitalism pushed westward, its rulers developed a conscious policy of genocide against the Native American population and forced the survivors onto reservations.
Unlike the eastern seaboard settlements, Spanish colonial society was built on the backs of the indigenous inhabitants. The Spanish discovered a people one stage beyond those that the British found along the East Coast. The Aztec society, based on the cultivation of corn, was in the middle stages of barbarism. The Spanish were in a period of transition from feudalism to capitalism. The inevitable and irreconcilable clash produced by the meeting of these agents of European class society with the collectivist societies of the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples of Mexico resulted not only in a new race, the mestizo, but also in combined economic forms. Early colonial society in Mexico was as much feudal as it was bourgeois. Colonial and postcolonial society was characterized by the exploitation of precapitalist modes of production (serfdom, slavery, debt peonage, sharecropping) for the benefit of the rising capitalist system.
The conquest of the Aztecs and of other native peoples living in what became the Republic of Mexico resulted in their decimation. Disease, slavery, overwork in the fields and in the mines, starvation caused by the expropriation and export of agricultural produce, and the brutal repression against all resistance to the conquest took their toll. It is estimated that Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) had upwards of 300,000 inhabitants and that several million Indians populated the Valley of Mexico. In 1646 this population reached a low point of 1,250,000.
Revolts broke out throughout the colonial period. A revolt by the Pueblo Indians in 1680 drove the Spanish and mestizos out of New Mexico. It was not until twelve years later that the area was resettled. In 1848 those who dominated major sections of the provinces of northern Mexico were neither Mexicans nor Anglo-Americans. They were the nomadic Apaches and other hunters and food gatherers who resisted not only the Spanish and the mestizo settlers but also the Anglo invasion of the area.
The frontier settlements of northern Mexico were separated from the central seat of power in Mexico City by large belts of desert and hostility of the native peoples who controlled the deserts separating New Mexico from California and isolating New Mexico from the settlements in Texas. With the opening of the Santa Fe trail in 1820, residents of New Mexico could trade more easily with Saint Louis than with Chihuahua in northern Mexico. These geographical factors, as well as the resistance of those Indians who refused to be conquered, led to a certain isolation of Mexico’s northernmost provinces from the central administration of the weak criolle (Mexican-born Spaniards) bourgeoisie. This encouraged the territorial ambitions of both the slavocracy and northeastern capitalists in the United States, who viewed these territories as easy prey.
The ability of Mexico to govern its northern provinces was further weakened during the ten-year struggle for national independence in which 500,000 of its citizens lost their lives. Although formal independence from Spain was achieved in 1821, the criolle bourgeoisie merely replaced the Spanish administration, leaving the conditions of the masses unaltered. Independence was soon followed by the Spanish invasion of Tampico in 1829, a short-lived French blockade of Veracruz in 1838, and secession of Yucatan from 1839 to 1843, and was marked by unstable govermental regimes up to 1851.
The introduction of the cotton gin in the late 1790s greatly increased the desire of the southern slavocracy to open up new land to exploit. This drive for territorial expansion led to the Louisiana Purchase from the French in 1803, the purchase of Florida from Spain in 1819, and the eventual clash with Mexico over the twelve-year period from 1836 to 1848.
A further factor propelled the slave system westward. The intense production of cotton as a single cash crop quickly impoverished the soil of the South, resulting in lower yields. Since the Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery from moving northwest, the Mexican province of Texas, which was larger than France and well suited for cotton, was a logical area for expansion.
As early as 1825, President John Quincy Adams attempted to purchase the Texas province from Mexico. When Mexico refused, other means were employed. The southern planters who dominated the U.S. federal government encouraged the settling of Texas by Anglo-Americans with the hope that they would outnumber the small Mexican population and create enough difficulties for Mexico so that it would relinquish control to the United States. After initially issuing land grants to such settlers, Mexico became alarmed at the rapid growth of the Anglo population and the violation of the conditions stipulated in the grants. In 1830 a Mexican government decree prohibited further colonization of Texas by Anglo-Americans and called for collection of custom duties along the Louisiana border.
The Anglo-American Texans, who were legally Mexican citizens, refused to submit to the authority of the Mexican government and maintained slavery. They set up the Independent Republic of Texas in 1836. This led to the sending of Mexican troops into Texas, resulting in the attack on the Alamo by General Santa Anna and the subsequent defeat of Santa Anna by the army of Sam Houston. By that time Anglo-American settlers outnumbered the Mexicanos by 6 to 1. The slavocracy looked forward to immediately annexing Texas to the United States with the idea of carving six slave states out of the immense territory. But divisions within the U.S. ruling classes delayed annexation until 1845.
The main issue of the presidential campaign of 1844 was the annexation of Texas, with the Democratic Party running James Polk in favor, and the Whigs running Henry Clay in moderate opposition to annexation. The victory of the Democrats, who represented the southern planters, guaranteed annexation.
But the plans and desires of the slavocracy went beyond Texas. President Polk was intent on provoking Mexico into a war which would end in the conquest of all of Mexico. The Democratic Party convention, meeting in New York State in 1844, resolved: “That the title of the Mexican government is a title by conquest from those who held it by conquest. If we took it and held it by the same title, they could not complain. Their title is legal; and our title would also be legal.” The chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations stated in 1848 that the Mexicans could be removed to reservations in the same manner as the United States had subjugated the native North Americans.
The northern capitalists opposed adding Texas as another slave state and feared the enhanced political weight of a strengthened slavocracy expanding south into Mexico. But they favored provoking a war with Mexico to gain the commercially valuable harbors of California. The commander of the United States exploring expedition to the Pacific prior to 1845 praised the commercial possibilities of the West Coast, stating that it could easily fall into the hands of “the Anglo-Norman race . . . having none to enter into rivalry with it but the indolent inhabitants of warm climates. . . .”
The ideological justification for this expansionism was Manifest Destiny. President Polk expressed the desires of the U.S. ruling class in the following terms: “Our union is a federation of independent states whose policy is peace with each other and all the world. To enlarge its limits is to extend the dominions of peace over additional territories and increasing millions.” But the expression of this expansionism was not merely limited to a particular view of the American nation. The racist ideology of the ruling class, both North and South, was perhaps best expressed by a northern capitalist, Commodore Stockton, who commanded the U.S. assault in California during the war with Mexico: “I will not attempt to impeach or defend what I believe to be the inevitable destiny of my country and of my race. ... I am unwilling to say to my countrymen that you shall go no farther east or west or north or south. I am unwilling that the Anglo-American race shall perpetually recoil from any given boundary and that any portion of this continent not now in their possession shall forever be impenetrable to their civilization, enterprise and industry.”
The war began in 1846, and during its course the United States defeated Mexico’s armies and occupied Mexico City. The Democratic administration favored taking all of Mexico, but was stopped short by opposition in Congress. The government negotiator completed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, against the orders of Polk. The treaty was subsequently ratified by the Senate giving the United States one-half of Mexico’s national territory, an area larger than France and Germany combined. In addition to Texas the newly won U.S. territory encompassed what are now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, part of Wyoming, and the western part of Colorado.
Mexico attempted to include a provision prohibiting slavery in the ceded area but this was rejected by the United States. Mexico was paid $15 million for the entire area. The Mesilla Valley (Gadsden Purchase), was added in 1853.
Besides formalizing the military conquest, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also guaranteed certain rights to the conquered Mexican inhabitants. Article VIII stated:
“Mexicans now established in territories previously belonging to Mexico, and which remain for the future within the limits of the United States, as defined by the present treaty, shall be free to continue where they now reside, or to remove at any time to the Mexican Republic, retaining the property which they possess in the said territories. . .
“In the said territories, property of every kind, now belonging to Mexicans not established there, shall be inviolably respected. The present owners, the heirs of these, and all Mexicans who may hereafter acquire said property by contract, shall enjoy with respect to it guarantees equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens of the United States.”
Article IX guaranteed to those who became citizens (automatic one year from the date of the treaty, unless an individual specifically chose to remain a Mexican citizen) “enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States, according to the principles of the Constitution,” and also “the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secure in the free exercise of their religion without restriction.”
Every one of these guarantees has been systematically violated since that day.
With the end of the Civil War the United States government concentrated its military forces on crushing the Indians, including those m the territory of Arizona and New Mexico. In order to keep the southern routes to California open for commerce and to consolidate its hold over this former Mexican territory, the U.S. Army systematically destroyed the flocks, fields, and orchards of the Navajos, forcing their surrender and removal to reservations. The Apaches and Comanches, severely reduced in numbers and area, were driven into the worst desert or rugged mountain areas and were finally defeated and captured.
This had the temporary effect of permitting a brief expansion of the Mexicano settlements, particularly in New Mexico and Arizona. But this process was cut short by the expanding Anglo cattle ranchers and farmers who encroached on the Mexicano farmers and sheepherders. The trade which developed between Santa Fe and Saint Louis had gradually opened up New Mexico and Arizona to the influence of eastern capital. The establishment of the railroads along the old trails to Santa Fe and then on to California by 1885, eclipsed the trade of Mexicano caravans.
Along with the railroads came the growth of capital-intensive mining operations which shifted from gold to silver and then to copper, displacing Mexicano miners through competition where it was not done through outright fraud and violence. By 1900 mining was predominantly mechanized and controlled by eastern capitalists using a Mexicano labor force. Anglo capitalists extended their railroad and mining interests into northern Mexico itself. By 1910 Guggenheim had a virtual monopoly of the metallurgical industry in Mexico and U.S. interests dominated the railroads there.
The railroads of the Southwest were built mainly by Mexicano labor. After 1880 up to 70 percent of section crews and 90 percent of the extra gangs on the principal western lines were Mexicanos. The present Chicano settlements of Chicago and Kansas City grew out of railroad labor camps.
A new rich lode of gold was discovered in California almost immediately after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Mexicans had been successfully mining gold between Los Angeles and Santa Cruz a decade before James W. Marshall made his famous discovery.
The Californios, as the Mexican inhabitants of that former part of Mexico referred to themselves, lost no time in applying their mining knowledge to the rich deposits. By 1848 1,300 out of the approximately 7,500 Mexican population were engaged in gold mining. By the end of 1848 there were already some 4,000 Anglo miners. The news of the new discovery of gold brought some 8,000 Mexicans from Sonora into California along with 5,000 South Americans, mainly Chileans and Peruvians. But the largest influx was of Anglo-Americans, who by the end of 1849 numbered 80,000.
The period from 1849 to 1860 was one of violence, fraud, and intimidation against Spanish-speaking miners, ranchers, and farmers by Anglo miners who considered them to be something less than human beings, an attitude reflecting the ideology of the capitalist and slaveholder ruling classes in Washington, now in control of California. Whippings, brandings, ear croppings, and lynchings were commonplace occurrences for Mexicano miners who dared to defend their claims as guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
When California became a state in 1850, the state legislature wasted no time in levying the notorious foreign miners’ license tax law of 1850, which was used as a pretext to drive Mexicanos, Chileans, and Peruvians out of their mine claims.
From 1850 to 1900, the Anglo settlers, merchants, and their politicians and lawyers expropriated almost the entire propertied class of Californios. (This class was predominantly of Spanish blood and light-skinned.) Those who did not lose their lands were reduced to small holdings. Toward the end of the 1800s the Mexicano population was in retreat, the distinction between Californios and Cholos (the poor working masses of predominantly Indian blood) all but wiped out, and a racist Anglo majority firmly entrenched. This point was not reached, however, without a fight. Guerrilla bands developed during the 1850s which tried to hold back the Anglo invasion. But the forces of occupation were overwhelming.
The expropriation of Tejano (Mexican Texan) landowners by Anglos proceeded in a similar fashion. In California, New Mexico, and Texas many of the ricos (wealthy Mexican landowners) collaborated with the Anglo invaders but to little avail. They too were either expropriated or driven out of business by a combination of Anglo lawyers and unfavorable economic conditions. Succeeding generations of these families were driven into the working class. The tremendous wealth derived from the mines and lands stolen from Mexico and then from the Mexican owners themselves, played an important part in the financing of eastern capitalist expansion.
As early as the 1890s Mexicanos were working the cotton fields of East Texas. By 1910 cotton was spreading into central Texas, creating a need for cheap labor. Certain conditions in Mexico created the labor supply to meet that need. The recession of 1907 generated a large amount of unemployment which encouraged the beginnings of migration from Mexico. With the start of the Mexican revolution in 1910 this migration was greatly accelerated.
The First World War also created an expanding need in the United States for agricultural produce and textiles. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, one million Mexicans crossed into the United States, primarily into Texas and California. The passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which reduced European immigration, increased demand for Mexicano workers, who moved as far north as Detroit, as far east as Pittsburgh, and into Alaskan canneries.
Prior to 1924 the contract-labor law of 1885 forced growers to recruit labor illegally. Labor smugglers went into Mexico to recruit workers. On bringing them across the border they would be sold to a labor contractor who would then sell the workers for 50 cents to $1.00 a head, to a grower or railroad or mine employer. Carey McWilliams in North From Mexico described the handling of these workers:
“Shipments of workers en route to employers were often kept locked up at night, in barns, warehouses, and corrals, with armed guards posted to prevent their theft. Crews of imported Mexicans were marched through the streets of San Antonio under armed guard in broad daylight and, in Gonzáles County, workers who attempted to breach their contracts were chained to posts and guarded by men with shotguns.”
By 1929 the Southwest was producing 40 percent of the nation’s supply of vegetables, fruit, and truck crops with a labor force that was from 65 percent to 85 percent Mexicano. The sugar beet industry in Colorado alone produced more profits than all the gold and silver ever mined in that state. Agribusiness was not alone in recognizing the profit that could result from a cheap source of labor. Some workers went directly from central Mexico, as well as from Texas, to Midwest industrial centers where they were employed in steel mills, packing plants, auto factories, and tanneries. The pressure from the sugar beet industry, the Texas Emigrant Agent Law of 1929, and the depression brought this movement to a halt.
Contrary to the myth of their docility, Mexicano workers began organizing as early as 1883 in Texas. Strikes occurred throughout the country before World War I and after, but they were almost invariably met with violence and deportation. Many of these deported workers then became union organizers in Mexico. Some, including IWW members, played a role in the famous Cananea miners’ strike in Sonora, Mexico, in 1906, a date marking the start of the Mexican labor movement. During the depression years in the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicanos were forced by the U.S. government to repatriate to get them off the welfare rolls. Many were from families who had lived in the United States for generations.
The start of the Second World War brought about dramatic changes among the Mexicano population of the United States. With the expanded war production many farm workers were drawn into the cities and into basic industry. Although this did not create a shortage of labor in agriculture, the growers feared that elimination of the large surplus labor pool would drive wages up and create conditions more favorable for unionization. Also, competition with industrial wage rates would mean a lowering of profit.
The growers convinced the Roosevelt administration to negotiate a contract with Mexico for the importation of farm workers, as an emergency war measure. This Bracero Program amounted to a direct subsidy of agribusiness which was already garnering huge profits. Under the plan, the U.S. government paid out $120 million to import a total of about 400,000 Mexicans between 1943 and 1947. They were restricted to agriculture, although a special arrangement was made for 80,000 of them to work as section hands and maintenance workers on the railroads at low wages.
The war resulted in an increasing urbanization of La Raza and further proletarianization of their ranks. The war, however, had a further effect. Many Mexicanos believed that service in the armed forces was a means of gaining full rights as citizens of the United States. Another important aspect of the war experience was that, while Afro-Americans were in separate, all-Black units, Mexicanos were not segregated. This did not mean freedom from discrimination and racist practices, but it was an improvement over the repressive conditions experienced in the barrios of East Los Angeles and the fields of Texas and California.
The so-called Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 were the most notorious examples of overt racism and brutality toward Mexicanos in this period. Following on the heels of the internment in concentration camps of the Japanese-Americans in 1942, and the hysterical campaign against nonwhite peoples which accompanied the expropriation of the Japanese-Americans, the Los Angeles press began a campaign against youth known as “Pachucos” (identified by the zoot suits many young Mexicanos then wore). The Hearst press and the Los Angeles Times played on all the racist attitudes of the Anglo population, including the local police theory that Mexicanos were biologically predisposed to violence and crime. They whipped up an atmosphere which led to a week of vicious attacks by Anglo servicemen on Mexicano youth especially, but also on Black youth in Los Angeles.
The events in Los Angeles were followed by similar attacks on Black and Mexicano communities elsewhere, from Beaumont, Texas, to Detroit, Michigan. The international embarrassment these incidents caused Washington finally forced President Roosevelt to intervene. Most serious to the ruling class was the possibility of Mexico cutting off the Bracero Program in protest. Roosevelt’s refusal to act swiftly to defend the victims of these racist attacks is one more item in the long list of the crimes of the Democratic Party.
The impact of U.S. capitalist propaganda about “liberating oppressed peoples” from fascism and colonialism, however, was great. Mexicano GIs returning from years of the imperialist slaughter were expecting respect and full rights. They found quite a different situation, however. They were discriminated against as before, and were even excluded from groups such as the American Legion and other veterans’ organizations. They were still considered “greasers,” “dirty Mexicans.”
One postwar incident helped focus the resentment and bitterness of La Raza. The family of a Texas Chicano war hero was refused a plot in a Corpus Christi cemetery for their son. The national and international embarrassment to the ruling class caused President Truman to provide burial for the soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. But the lesson was not lost on returning veterans, who founded their own organizations, such as the GI Forum, organized in 1948 in Corpus Christi, Texas. While the Forum stated that one of its objectives was to “preserve and defend the United States of America from all enemies,” it also proposed to “secure and protect for all veterans and their families, regardless of race, creed or color, the privileges invested in them by the Constitution and laws of our country.” In less than a year, there were more than 100 GI Forum chapters throughout the Southwest.
Another such organization was the Unity League, organized in southern California. Composed primarily of veterans and workers, the Unity League participated in electoral activity, running candidates of their own and electing a city councilman in Chino, California, in 1946. This victory encouraged others to run for office. Ed Roybal, a veteran, ran for Los Angeles city council as an independent. Although he lost, an organization grew out of his campaign called the Community Service Organization (CSO), which was at first composed solely of World War II veterans and was then expanded to include first their wives and later others from the broader community. In 1949 Roybal ran again and won with the support of the CSO. With the advent of the cold war, Roybal quickly moved to the right, into the Democratic Party, where he has remained to this day. The CSO meanwhile became involved in a series of community activities and civil rights fights.
César Chávez, leader of the farm workers’ union, gained much of his political experience as an organizer for and one time director of the CSO. After it conducted successful voter registration and education drives (in 1960, the CSO registered 137,000 Chicanos to vote, 95 percent of whom voted for John F. Kennedy), the AFL-CIO began giving the CSO financial assistance to expand their work. In recent years, however, the organization has been declining in both membership and influence and has tended to oppose the new rise of Chicano militancy.
Thousands of the returning World War II veterans took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights to get a high school and college education, to buy homes, and to set up small businesses. By 1956, 2 percent of the professionals in Los Angeles County had Spanish surnames. Organizations reflecting the small but growing number of white-collar workers and professionals sprang up during the 1950s. The Council of Mexican-American Affairs (CMAA) in Los Angeles, attempting to bring together various community organizations, gave birth to a special education committee which raised the issue of special programs to meet the needs of Chicano students. The Association of Mexican-American Educators (AMAE), founded in 1965, continued this work, also helping to elect Julian Nava to the Los Angeles school board in 1967. In 1959, the Mexican-American Political Association (MAPA) was organized as the first Mexican-American group in the postwar period to proclaim itself political. It was built around the Democratic Party successes of 1958 when several Chicanos were elected to office in California.
The Second World War, then, saw increased urbanization of La Raza, proletarianization of its ranks, and the development of a small layer of professionals. Organizations reflecting these changes appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s and helped set the stage for the resurgence of militancy in the decade of the 1960s.
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