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violence. Today, when gay couples in those 20 states apply for marriage
licenses, it is not an exaggeration to say that they are able to do so because
of the patrons at the Stonewall who fought back in June 1969.Viva La Raza!
Just as African Americans, Women, and gays worked for an expanded and
participatory democracy, so did Mexican Americans, or, Chicanos, a word pre-
ferred by many younger activists to also speak to their Indian roots. Most
Mexican Americans came to the U.S. to work in the agricultural fields of the
Southwest and West, especially in Texas, Arizona, and California. Many came
under the bracero program, begun during World War II as a way for Chicanos
to legally come to America to do farm labor. The braceros [people who worked
with their arms and hands, manual laborers, in Spanish] had to sign contracts,
written in English and establishing few rights for them, and once the contracts
expired, they had to turn in their work permits and go back to Mexico.
Indeed, it evoked memories of sharecropping. They worked in the vegetable,
strawberry, lettuce and grape fields making as little as a dime an hour and
often not even having toilets or clean water in the fields, plus farm workers
were exempt from labor and minimum-wage laws, so the farm owners could
put their workers into a nearly slave-like status. The bracero program was in
fact called “legalized slavery” by one official, and was disbanded in 1964. After
that, unable to find jobs at home, many Mexicans began to stream into the
U.S. illegally to find agricultural work, so that there were about 5 million
Mexicans working in the U.S. in the 1960s. For those already in the country,
the situation was not much better. Chicanos were given inferior educations
or, in some cases, denied schooling. In Texas, for example, 90 percent of
Chicanos did not get a high school diploma, and the masses were forced to
live in barrios, or very poor neighborhoods in urban areas. The immigration
battles of the 2010s, therefore, were not new or unique; they were similar to
the struggles of migrant issues of the 1960s.
In the mid-1960s, Chicanos began to organize and get involved in politics
and direct actions, a “Brown Power” movement not unlike the Black civil
rights movement. The most noted activist became a labor leader, Cesar Chavez,
who began to organize migrant farm workers for the United Farm Workers
Union [UFW]. The union wanted higher wages, decent housing, and an end