Cesar Chavez hunger strike (1 feb 1968 año – 1 mar 1968 año)

Descripción:

UFW: A union of farmworkers founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta that sought to empower the mostly Mexican American migrant farmworkers who faced discrimination and exploitative conditions, especially in the Southwest
MALDEF: A Mexican American civil rights organization founded in 1967 and based on the model of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. MALDEF focused on legal issues and endeavored to win protections against discrimination through court decisions
La Raza Unida: A political party founded in Texas in 1970 by Mexican Americans as an alternative to the two major political parties; La Raza Unida (The United Race) ran candidates for state and local governments and expanded to other states.


The push for Mexican American equality gained fewer national headlines than African American campaigns but shared similar aims and tactics. In Cesar Chavez, Mexican Americans had something of a counterpart to the charismatic Martin Luther King Jr. Where King took inspiration from his religious calling for moral clarity, Chavez drew from his roots in community organizing and the labor movement, as well as the Catholic Church. He and Dolores Huerta, like Chavez an emerging Mexican American activist, had worked for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a California group founded in the 1950s to promote Mexican political participation and civil rights. After leaving the CSO in 1962, Chavez concentrated on the agricultural region around Delano, California. With Huerta, he organized the United Farm Workers (UFW), a union for migrant workers, some of the most vulnerable segments of the population, who faced discrimination and exploitative conditions, especially in the Southwestern states.

Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez were two of the leading Mexican American civil rights and social justice advocates of the 1960s. Huerta, influenced by community-organizing traditions, founded two social justice and workers’ rights organization before she joined with Chavez in 1962 to cofound the United Farm Workers (UFW), a union of primarily Mexican American agricultural laborers in California. Chavez, influenced equally by the Catholic Church and Mahatma Gandhi, and Huerta led the UFW’s massive national grape boycott, an attempt by the UFW to force the nation’s grape growers — and, by extension, the larger agriculture industry — to improve wages and working conditions and to bargain in good faith with the union.

Huerta was a brilliant organizer, and the deeply spiritual and ascetic Chavez embodied the moral force behind what was popularly called La Causa. In support of a grape pickers’ strike, the UFW called for a nationwide boycott of table grapes in 1965. The boycott won publicity and backing from the AFL-CIO. As the labor conflict continued, Chavez mounted a hunger strike to win attention for the struggle. His fast ended dramatically after twenty-eight days, with now-Senator Robert F. Kennedy at his side. A conclusive victory came in 1970, when California grape growers signed contracts recognizing the UFW. The labor campaign led by Chavez and Huerta in California’s vast agriculture industry resonated beyond the picking fields, inspiring Mexican Americans, urban and rural alike, across the Southwest.

Mexican Americans shared many economic grievances with African Americans — especially limited access to jobs — but they also had unique concerns: the status of the Spanish language in schools, for instance, and immigration policy. Mexican Americans had been politically active since the 1940s, and those efforts began to pay off in the 1960s. The Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) mobilized support for the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy and worked successfully with other organizations to elect Mexican American candidates such as Edward Roybal of California and Henry González of Texas to Congress. Two other organizations joined the fight. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), founded in 1967 and based on the model of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, focused on legal issues and endeavored to win protections against discrimination through court decisions. And the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project mobilized an increasingly powerful Mexican American voting bloc.

But younger Mexican Americans grew impatient with the incremental gains of groups such as MAPA and MALDEF. A key inspiration for them was Reies Lopez Tijerina, an activist in New Mexico whose organization, known as La Alianza, called for the restoration of land owned by Mexican Americans that was confiscated by Anglos after the Mexican War. This militant spirit was picked up in Denver, Colorado, by Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales, who in 1966 founded the Crusade for Justice to reach out to younger Mexican Americans. Just a year later, the barrios of Los Angeles and other western cities produced the militant Brown Berets, named for the hats they wore in homage to the Black Panthers.

As in the black freedom movement, young people infused the Mexican American cause with new energy and creativity. Rejecting their elders’ willingness to assimilate into Anglo society, fifteen hundred Mexican American students met in Denver in 1969 to hammer out a new political and cultural agenda. Called the National Youth and Liberation Conference, the assembled activists adopted the term Chicano (and its feminine form, Chicana) to replace Mexican American. In Texas, Chicano/a activists organized the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in 1967 and in 1970 led the formation of a political party, La Raza Unida (People United), an alternative to the two major parties that would promote Chicano interests and that eventually expanded to other states. Chicano students formed El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano/a de Aztlan, known as MEChA (pronounced “mecha”), a congress of campus-based groups that would ultimately grow to more than five hundred chapters by the 2000s. Young Chicana feminists formed a number of organizations, including Las Hijas (The Daughters), to organize women both on college campuses and in the barrios. In California and many southwestern states, students staged demonstrations to press for bilingual education, the hiring of more Chicano teachers, and the creation of Chicano studies programs.

Mexican American and Chicano activism forged significant changes in American life in subsequent decades. Government agencies and the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the right of non-English speaking Americans to access to education, and the 1974 Equal Educational Opportunities Act implemented bilingual programs in public schools. Chicano students, alongside their African American and Asian American counterparts, revolutionized college curricula, bringing ethnic studies into the mainstream and exposing students to new writers, artists, and historical figures rarely studied previously. The MALDEF developed into an important national defender of Mexican American rights, and the political organizing that followed on the heels of La Raza Unida helped elect thousands of Mexican Americans to government positions over the next decades, from local school boards to the U.S. Senate. Though activists were unable to achieve one of their foundational goals — significantly improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s farmworkers — their efforts brought legal protection and political and cultural representation to people long marginalized in national life.

Añadido al timeline:

fecha: