[essay]la confer en cia de mujeres por la raza
TRANSCRIPT
La Conferencia de Mujeres Por La Raza:
Chicana Activism and Identity in Houston
By Jaime Puente
The Civil Rights movement that swept the nation in the 1950s and 1960s took on many
different identities. The most prominent became the African American Civil Rights movement
led by people such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X, but looking beneath the black and
white dichotomy of American racial politics there is another civil rights movement to take notice
of. The Chican@ movement rose from the ashes of the Mexican American movement of the
1930s and 1940s, and during the late 1960s it became a growing force in American politics.
Unfortunately not civil rights movements are made equal. Just as their African American
brethren the Chican@s suffered from rampant sexism within their ranks. In public arenas and
speeches, women were denigrated to maids and cooks for the movement, but in the streets and
schools las mujeres occupied a much larger role. As the decade of the 1970s began, and the
Chican@ movement looked forward to dreams of national recognition in the upcoming
presidential election, Chicanas took it upon themselves to educate each other about their roles in
the movement, and in society.
La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza in the spring of 1971 suffered from factional
differences, but the meeting of over six hundred Chicana women from across the nation served
as a foundational moment in the future of Mexican American politics because it asserted the
importance of issues such as women’s reproductive health, political involvement, and education
to the core ideologies of the emerging Chican@ movement. To understand the origins of 1
Chicana/o political thought and activism it is helpful to understand some of the conditions both
men and women in the movement grew up around. Houston serves, as a prime example of the
racist, sexist, and economic oppression the emerging Chicana/o movement would try to address.
Mexican American political action in Houston, and around the United States, began as a
response to the discrimination and disenfranchisement caused by the dictums of racism. In
Houston the influence of the Jim Crow ordinances and laws is as significant as any other major
city in the Deep South. Historian and scholar Arnoldo De Leon describes the bigotry Mexican
Americans faced at the time because “Jim Crow codes applicable to black people extended to
Mexicans.”1 Barred from services and establishments specified for Anglos, the Mexican
American community suffered deplorable conditions in their neighborhoods. Terrible violence
marked the first three decades of the 1900s in Houston for both citizens and non-citizens because
as an insignificant sector of the city to local Anglo leaders; the barrios were not eligible for
police protection. In fact the police perpetrated many of the most devastating acts of savagery,
such as the murder of Elepidio Cortez in 1936.2 By that time the leadership of the Houston
colonia, along with others in the state, began to move to different methods of resistance against
the mounting oppression from the Anglo community, one that focused on assimilation and
ultimately on citizenship.
1 Arnoldo De León, Ethnicity in the Sunbelt: Mexican Americans in Houston (College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 26.
2 F. Arturo Rosales, “Shifting Self Perceptions and Ethnic Consciousness Among
Mexicans in Houston, 1908- 1946,” Atzlan 16, nos. 1-2 (1987): 87.2
The Mexican American Generation, as they labeled themselves, rose out of these
conditions that plagued the community over the course of American history, and in the 1930s
leaders began to emerge from the colonias and barrios to resist further subjugation.3 In February
of 1929 the organizing members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) met
in Corpus Christi, Texas, to formalize the first chapter of the group and produce a constitution
that would promote the goals of Mexican American people. Those who represented their
respective communities were some of the first major contributors to the efforts of mobilizing
eligible Mexican American people to vote. In fact LULAC’s founding constitution outlined the
importance of using their “vote and influence… to place in public office men who show by their
deeds, respect and consideration for our people.”4 The efforts of the group to urge every United
States citizen of Mexican descent to exercise their political power as a collective voting bloc was
one of the most important resolutions of the meeting. The successes of LULAC began to mount
as the decade of the 1930s progressed because through the efforts of leaders such as Houston’s
Felix Tijerina, John J. Herrera, and the great Texas educator George I. Sanchez who asserted the
whiteness of Mexican Americans, more access to equal rights had been secured.5
The leaders of the Mexican American community in the 1930s, especially in Texas and
California, stressed their proximity to whiteness as opposed to blackness. The supremacy of Jim
Crow and racial oppression determined the path of least resistance for acquiring more equal civil
rights for the people of the Mexican American Generation. However, by assuming a racialized
basis for their argument, LULAC leadership disenfranchised many of their own would be
supporters. The most troubling clauses written into the first constitution included highly
3
nationalistic wording that eventually created a divide between the first wave of Mexican
American civil rights efforts and the rising tide of Chican@ activism. The efforts to claim
whiteness precipitated clauses that accepted “the acquisition of the English language,” rejected
“radical and violent demonstration which may tend to create conflicts and disturb the peace and
tranquility of our country,” and most of all to “develop within the members of our race the best,
purest, and most perfect type of a true and loyal citizen of the United States of America.”6 One of
the key attributes of LULAC and the Mexican American Generation’s success was their
willingness to submit their people to the racial dichotomy of white versus black that ruled the
country. This first wave of political activism needed to project its Americanism through
whiteness. These tactics worked for the already established Mexican American middle-class who
were trying to find their way into a conversation that completely disregarded their presence. As
the decades progressed the initial gains made by those working with LULAC gave way into a
3 Historian Mario T. Garcia defines the “Mexican American Generation” in Mexican
Americans: Leadership, Ideology, & Identity, 1930- 1960 as the era between 1930 and 1950.
4 “Article II: LULAC Constitution,” Mexican Americans in the Southwest (Claremont,
CA: Ocelot Press, 1970), 116.
5 Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475 (1954); Neil Foley, “Mexican Americans and the
Color Line,” American Dreaming, Global Realities: Rethinking U.S. Immigration History.
Donna R. Gabaccia and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 361-
378.4
larger Civil Rights movement that spearheaded the equality of African Americans and changed
the way people across the country would pursue equal rights.
The post World War II baby boom combined with the increased access to education for
many returning soldiers spurred a large influx of politically aware and educated people into the
American population. Mexican American soldiers returning from the war made themselves more
aware of the racial inequalities that permeated their lives, and organized their own groups to
address issues of continuing discrimination. The American GI forum became one of the more
influential Mexican American political machines during the 1950s because the war seasoned
veterans who made up the organization supported active participation in the electoral process by
endorsing candidates and organizing get out the vote campaigns.7 By the mid-1950s the Mexican
American population in the United States had shed most of its nationalistic ties to Mexico, and
began planting their roots here by deepening their commitment to their future as Americans.
One of the most successful and well known Mexican American political activists that
came from this tradition is Cesar Chavez who used his philosophy of non-violent protest and
collective action to secure the rights of thousands of farm workers across the United States.8
Boycotts, hunger strikes, and grape picker strikes, that Chavez organized, energized young
Mexican American kids from around the United States to acquire a new consciousness of their
6 “Article II: LULAC Constitution,” Mexican Americans in the Southwest (Claremont,
CA: Ocelot Press, 1970), 116
7 Richard Griswald del Castillo, World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 20; Rosales 158.5
participation in the discrimination of their own people. By the late 1960s bilingual underground
newspapers such as Papel Chican@ and Compass in Houston began to express more radical
support for those fighting in the California farm worker’s union.9 The organization of a national
labor union for farm workers and the solidarity expressed in the urban centers by teenage
Mexican Americans led to a surge in group consciousness that reached across the United States.
The East L.A Walkouts in the spring of 1968 marked a momentous change in the political
activism of Mexican Americans because it was no longer something that only the established
middle class businessmen and educated elite could participate in.
Across the country students were awakening to the reality of their position in American
society. The walkouts that happened in East Los Angeles occurred in nearly every city that had a
large population of Mexican American students. Citing issues that affected both male and female
students the walkouts ignited a fury of adolescent rage that had been brewing over the last
decade. In Houston, Crystal City, San Antonio and other cities in Texas, the anger of being
brutally discriminated against found an ideological basis in the emerging radicalism of the
Chican@ movement. The disenfranchisement experienced by many young Mexican Americans
8 César Chávez, “The Organizer’s Tale,” reprinted in Renato rosaldo, Robert A. Calvert,
and Gustav L. Seligmann, eds. Chican@: The Evolution of a People (Minneapolis: Winston
Press, 1973), 197-302.
9 For more examples of local awareness of the California struggles see issues of El Papel
Chican@ and Compass as well as various clippings organized by Leonel J. Castillo at Houston
Metropolitan Resource Center. 6
led them to form several organizations that laid the foundation for more substantial political
gains in the following decades. The most influential of these was La Raza Unida Party that began
to form in the early 1970s. Working from the momentum gained from the national attention of
César Chávez’s UFW movement and the walkouts of the late 1960s, local Chican@ political
efforts took their chance at national recognition. Unfortunately, the nascent Chican@ Movement
would be plagued by much of the same problems that affected the Black Nationalist Movement
because amidst the fight against racism there was an equally taxing battle just starting to rage
against sexism.
The Chican@ Movement that rose out of the walkouts became a promising force that
tried to spread social consciousness throughout their respective communities. Chican@ leaders
tried to raise awareness of their people to the racial inequalities that exist and actively work to
resist oppression through political newspapers such as Houston’s Papel Chicano and Los
Angeles’s La Raza. Across the country students began to write manifestos that rang the bell of
Marxist and post-colonial thought in the sincere effort to educate what they perceived to be a
complacent Mexican American community.10 In Houston the efforts to educate each other on the
problems of Mexican American people in relation to their historical, sociological, and economic
context became the focus of many young people, especially Chicana women. As the local
movements grew into more interconnected national partnerships, the need to delineate a solid
10 El Papel Chican@ and Compass, HRMC; F. Arturo Rosales, Chican@. (Houston: Arté
Público Press, 1996), 97; José Ángel Gutiérrez, interviewed by Jesús Treviño, January 27, 1992,
NLCC, pp 10-11; 7
identity for the movement became a top priority and the leaders from each locale began vying for
their spot as the figurehead of a national La Raza Unida Party.
The radicalism of the 1960s witnessed the rise of several prominent leaders in the
Chican@ movement, all of them men who represented varying levels of political dogmatism.
Reis Lopez Tijerina gained his fame and allure as the leader of La Alianza Federal de los
Mercedes in New Mexico in the early 1960s when he and a group of others began occupying
national parks and attempted to arrest and try a county district attorney. Rodolfo “Corky”
Gonzalez made his name as the leader of the Denver student walkouts. One of the most
outspoken people in the Chican@ movement, Gonzalez felt his position in a national movement
could only be the leadership. From Texas the most prominent and successful Chican@ activist at
the time was José Ángel Gutiérrez who led the Mexican American activists to their first electoral
victories in Crystal City, Texas, in 1969.11 These men all worked from their own political
agendas and dogmas. Some had more formal education than the others and that was expressed
usually in terms of more flowery use of various philosophical references, especially that of Karl
Marx. In the reality of the day-to-day movement work, the ideological rhetoric didn’t register
with many people in the communities.
Chicanas were by far the most disenfranchised members of the Mexican American civil
rights movement because they suffered not only the racial discrimination that plagued the entire
community, but the internal domination of men. Marta Cotera, a founding member and key
organizer of La Raza Unida Party reflects on the status women had among their male
11 Rosales, Chican@, 238-241.8
counterparts saying, “what happens is that very often the women are very willing to do the work
and they don’t mind having a secondary role; they don’t mind not having the elected and
appointed positions.”12 Cotera is describing a subjugated position of women in the Chican@
movement that reflects a deeper submission to the patriarchal domination of men on women in
the Mexican American community. Scholar Maylei Blackwell discusses the relationship of
Chicanas to their identities as women amidst the growing feminist movement and she says that
the “contested and contestatory nature of Chican@ feminism” in the movement represented the
struggle to articulate “a new kind of Chicana political subject within the confines of masculinist
nationalism.”13 The women of the Chican@ movement understood the need to fight for the equal
rights of Mexican American people, and that fight included advancing their rights as women
within the movement. Still, some Chican@ activists refused to accept the terms of the larger,
Anglo led, Feminist movement.
The awareness of Mexican American women to their status as subjugated people came to
a hilt at La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza that met in Houston in May of 1971. Organized
by Houstonians Elma Barrera and other Chicana staff members of the Magnolia YWCA, the
12 Marta Cotera, Profile on the Mexican American Woman (Austin: national Laboratory
Publishers, 1976), 232-236.
13 Maylei Blackwell, “Contested Histories: La Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, Chicana Feminisms,
and Print Culture in the Chican@ Movement, 1968- 1973,” Chicana Feminisms: A Critical
Reader, Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, and Patricia
Zavella, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 74.9
conference sought to promote the social consciousness of Mexican American women and began
the discussion of their influence on the Chican@ movement from a national perspective.14
Representatives of women from twenty-three states scraped together their meager earnings,
allowances, and savings to attend the weekend meeting.15 Delegates to the conference included
Mexican American women who already established their organizing credentials such as Marta
Cotera from Crystal City, Grace Gil Olivarez from Pheonix, and professor Gracia Molina de
Peck from the University of California, who could share their knowledge and experience with
the other delegates. Cotera discusses her involvement in the La Conferencia as being driven by a
desire to communicate the lessons she learned to younger generations and inspire more direct
political action by Mexican American women. Despite their importance as organizers, the
women in the movement were not seeking political office and not allowed to hold active
leadership roles. Cotera says more women were needed “because very often they had jobs that
weren’t threatened or they had no jobs…They weren’t [economically] vulnerable.”16 Chicana
women had proven their importance to the day-to-day operations of el Movemiento, and yet they
remained in a subordinate position to their male counterparts. The women who organized La
14 La Conferencia de Mujeres Por La Raza Program, The Leonel J. Castillo Papers,
Houston Metropolitan Resource Center;
15 Carmen Hernandez, “Carmen Speaks Out,” El Papel Chican@, June 1971, Leonel J.
Castillo Papers, Houston Metropolitan Resource Center.
16 Cotera, 232.10
Conferencia made a strategic move to meet and discuss the issues that were important to them
and their constituencies at the first national meeting of Chicana women.
Many of the discussion panels held during the three day meeting were run by the veterans
of the movement who represented Houston, Crystal City, Los Angeles, Denver, and Santa Fe,
because they had several years of organizing experience and college educations. Like the broader
Chican@ movement las Mujeres depended upon those who could teach others the political craft
as well as raise their consciousness to the institutional ills facing their community.17 Panels and
lectures included “The Mexican American Women Public and Self-Image” by Julie Ruiz and
“Women in Politics-Is Anyone There?” which was moderated by Mary Lou de La Cerda.18 The
question of Chicana identity in the Mexican American community and so too the larger
American community became an overwhelming issue because as more and more women became
politically active they questioned the roles dictated by prominent Chican@ leaders such as
“Corky” Gonzalez. The firebrand leader of the Denver and California Chicanismo movement
had famously demanded, “a woman [should] influence her old man only under the covers or
when they are talking over the table.”19 The resistance to Chicana influence in the direction of
local movements made it clear to some women participating that their ability to communicate
17 DeLeon, 197.
18 Official Program: La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza, HRMC.
19 Antonio Carmejo, ed. “Why a Chican@ Party? Why Chican@ Studies?” (pamphlet)
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 10; Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women
in Twentieth-Century America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 108-109.11
and share ideas hinged on raising the awareness of inequality within the movement at the
conference.
The May 1971 meeting of Mujeres por la Raza precipitated the first meeting of the
National La Raza Unida Party that was scheduled to meet the next summer during the 1972
election season. The efforts of women to organize ahead of time and prepare to do the hard work
of debating issues that influenced all Chican@ people gave La Conferencia the gravitas it needed
to be a hotbed of social, political, and economic thought for Mexican American women. In fact
the events of the conference can even be said to foreshadow the events of the national party
meeting because they both became separated along ideological boundaries.20 More than six
hundred women met at the Magnolia YWCA from all across the United States, and some, more
organized than others, brought newspapers to show what they had been working on in their
cities. The women from Los Angeles, for example, brought La Hijas de Cuauhtéhmoc, a self-
published account of the California meeting that detailed the problems Chicana’s had to contend
with in the movimiento, and as Sandra Ugarte writes, “We must start with the oppression of the
Chicana woman and develop it to see how it ties into the Chican@ movement. We must, also,
realize how the Chicano movement ties into the struggle of all oppressed people.”21 The women
20 Rosales discusses in detail the divisions at the NLRU that fell largely along the fault
lines created by “Corky” Gonzalez of Denver and José Ángel Gutíerrez of Crystal City in his
work Chican@! (1996).
21 Sandra Ugarte, “Chicana Regional Conference: Philosophy Workshop,” La Hijas de
Cuauhtéhmoc, in Leonel J. Castillo Papers, Houston Metropolitan Resource Center.12
who attended the meeting were ready to work on the issues, and problems they and their families
faced, but not all of the attendees were as aware of their position as Chicanas in American
society as some would have hoped.
In an article published in El Papel Chicano after the conference, one Chicana relayed the
experiences of women who felt left out of the proceedings. At a meeting that focused largely on
raising social, political, and economic awareness, there were some who did not want to be
associated with the larger feminist movement. Two factions began to arise during the convention
that split on the issue of “women’s lib” because many Chicana’s either did not know much about
the movement other than what they saw happening nationally, or they did not identify with the
feminist ethos, as they knew it. Carmen Hernandez writes in El Papel Chican@ that “one of the
most common complaints was that the conference was turning into a ‘women’s liberation’
movement, and many of us felt that ‘women’s lib’ is irrelevant to the Chican@ movement.”22
Logistical issues combined with the struggle to assert a new distinct Chican@ identity drove a
wedge between the conference attendees. Shortly after the Sunday morning panels started on
May 30, 1971, a group of anti-women’s lib Chicanas, led by Marta Cotero, staged a walkout in
protest of the meeting’s purpose and organization.23 La Conferencia proved that the efforts to
nationalize the local, regionalized movements were much more difficult because the different
levels of social consciousness that Chican@ people experienced became a barrier to the larger
movement’s efforts.
22 Hernandez, El Papel Chican@, HRMC.
23 De Leon, 197; Cotero, 235; Blackwell, 76.13
The meeting of women from across the country may have ended in controversy, but the
work they accomplished set in motion political, social, and economic, changes that left an
indelible mark on American society. After the meeting of Chicanas, the national party
convention could not escape the needs of women because there were many who attended the
Houston meeting and were prepared to fight for their right to have an opinion in the proceedings.
Not every Chicana felt the need to adopt more radical feminist ideologies. Despite that, the
efforts to educate each other provided more leadership opportunities in the future for Mexican
American women.
Women who attended the Houston meeting in 1971 went on to teach, run for office, and
even gain national recognition as one of the nation’s first Chicana television anchors. The
importance of La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza reached every member of the community
because the women saw the need to be active not just for themselves but for their families. Vicki
Ruiz remarks that one motive of Chicana women in the struggle for equal rights was that they
did not want “a piece of the “American pie”, they wanted the freedom to bake their own pan
dulce.”24 Chicana’s saw their efforts reflected in each other and became more determined to
assert their own will and objectives for their people. In Houston, the efforts resulted in having
several Chicana’s elected as State Representatives, City Council members, school board
officials, and other positions of power. The legacy built by the conference continues to influence
local Mexican American politics, long after las Mujeres went home.
24 Ruiz 105.14
The first national meeting of Chicana women, La Conferencia de Mujeres por La Raza in
May of 1971, brought together many different women with drastically different ideas about the
problems facing Chicanas. The women who organized, spoke at, and attended the meeting
sought to define more clearly the role they played in the larger Chican@ rights movement and so
too their role in the future of American society. Stressing issues such as women’s reproductive
rights, feminist consciousness, and political organizing, the work done at the YWCA opened the
floodgates for women’s political involvement in the movimiento as well as mainstream politics.
The lack of respect given to female activists by male leaders in the Chican@ movement were
addressed through raising feminist consciousness, but not all women were interested in what they
saw as an Anglo influenced philosophy. In retrospect the conference did extremely important
work of giving Chicana’s a venue to express their beliefs and laid a foundation for others to
follow because as the Chican@ movement began to coalesce it was the women who provided the
strongest ideological support for a new Chican@ political identity, and not the overly zealous
male leaders.
15