Guided by a Vision : How Bert Corona met the challenges of Latino leadership : MEMORIES OF CHICANO HISTORY: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona, <i> By Mario T. Garcia (University of California Press: $30; 360 pp.)</i>

Very early in his life, Bert Corona made a commitment that he would honor for more than six decades: to devote all his energy into organizing the Mexican-American community into labor unions.

This memoir, narrated to historian Mario Garcia, recounts the story of Corona’s activism in the Mexican communities of California. Although it describes some of the movement’s accomplishments and failures, it is ultimately Corona’s history: a consciously self-centered account of his accomplishments and failures.

In his struggle for unionism, Corona was guided by a resolutely socialist vision. Identifying himself as an ordinary working-class Mexican, he began organizing his community with the conviction that class struggle is the motor of history and that the Mexican people will only be truly liberated when they understand the need to change the relationship of social forces. The “real forces” writes Corona, “are General Motors and the other big corporations. . . . The enemy (is) the corporate power. . . .”

Even today, in his work as national director of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Latino immigrant rights group, Corona’s socialist conviction remains in place. Corona, of course, did not lead a great Mexican revolution in the United States, nor was he able to change the path of history and turn the means of production over to the workers. He was, however, able to find his own niche in the history of the Chicano labor movement by defending the rights of undocumented workers at a time when nobody else, including great labor leaders like Cesar Chavez, would represent them.

Corona is actually very generous and respectful toward Chavez even as he details his disagreement with the Mexican icon. “I did have an important difference with Cesar” Corona writes. “This involved his, and the Union’s position on the need to apprehend and deport undocumented Mexican immigrants who were being used as scabs by the growers. . . . The Hermandad believed that organizing undocumented farm workers was auxiliary to the union’s efforts to organize the fields. We supported an open immigration policy, as far as Mexico was concerned.”

Corona turned out to be right and Chavez wrong. The farm workers’ union ran into a cul de sac precisely because its leaders failed to understand how to turn the tide. Instead of converting the undocumented to his union, Chavez and those close to him denounced them as scabs and fought them with a vengeance. He would pay the price for this myopia with an increasingly debilitated union membership.

But if Chavez was wrong and Corona was right on this one, that was not always the case. Chavez and Corona lived parallel lives that seldom crossed the same paths because their approach toward the community was substantially different.

Corona believed in the so-called “progressive” strategy to reach the community from a liberal, anticlerical position. Chavez knew that Mexicans are basically conservative, Catholic and nationalistic and drew his strategy along these lines. “The farm workers’ struggle in the sixties,” Corona wrote, “had a dual character, which Cesar artfully shaped. It was a labor battle, but it also had the dimensions of a mass community involvement . . . (Cesar) employed all the trappings of a Mexicano national involvement: the symbols of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Mexican flag, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, the songs, the colors, the eagle--all that became a movement.” Chavez grew to become the Mexican national figure. Corona remained a regional leader.

Corona came to California from his native El Paso in the decade of the 1930s. In Los Angeles, he became acquainted with the Communist Party and although he denies ever joining it, he does praise its “unwavering dedication to ameliorating the terrible conditions under which poor people such as Mexicans were forced to live.”

Corona defines himself as a socialist, influenced more by Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens and Jack London than by Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels. Reading his testimonial, it becomes clear that his ideology is based more on the practice of hard core unionizing than on rigorous readings of Marx.

His career as a union organizer begins almost simultaneously in three organizations: the Longshoremen’s Union, the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Mexican American Movement. The first provides him with the practical training for organizing, the second gives him an ideological framework, while the third puts him directly in touch with America’s Spanish-speaking communities.

In the ‘40s Corona was involved in the activities of the Congreso Nacional del Pueblo de Habla Espanola, defined by its founder, Luisa Moreno as a broad civil rights organization for all of the Spanish speaking people in the United States. It is during the first convention of El Congreso in 1939 that Corona formulated the ideas which, with many variations, were to direct his actions in the decades to come. “The congregation of so many Spanish-speaking people,” he wrote, “stamped in my mind, and in the minds of many others, that we were a national minority and not just a regional one.”

By the 1960s, Corona had become involved in national politics, working in the political campaigns of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy. While Corona was disenchanted with the lack of commitment toward Mexican-Americans shown by the first two, he believes that Bobby could have made a difference. Bobby’s untimely death led Corona to seek other strategies, such as his involvement with the Mexican American Political Assn. (MAPA), “formed as a reaction to the unwillingness of the Democratic Party to support in any real sense the needs and interests of Mexicans and other Spanish-speaking people in California and the Southwest.”

Under Corona’s leadership, MAPA became, at least in California, the dominant Mexican-American political organization.

Corona’s stance toward the Chicano Movement of the late ‘60s and its new and young radical leaders is remarkably harsh. But while his portrait of the times is partial and opinionated, it is also truly energetic, vital and moving, especially in its detailed description of the events surrounding the death of journalist Ruben Salazar.

Toward the end of these pages, Corona shows that his vision of the Latino community remains unchanged. It is a vision that is perhaps too one-dimensional for today’s complex world. We Hispanics are “characterized by the conditions of our existence,” he writes. “Economically, we occupy lower levels than whites as a result of racism. . . . The only way to get out from under the difficulties created by racism, marginalization and injustice is through political means.”

Corona’s arguments would have been stronger had he added a few words about personal responsibility and individual motivation. At times, the community he portrays looks and sounds like a mere puppet, capable of neither self-initiative nor self-criticism.

Still, who can argue about the importance of political empowerment to increase the clout of the Mexican-American community? And who can deny the evident instances of racism, marginalizing and injustice suffered by the Latino community?

The UC Press is to be commended for printing a memoir that fills in the gaps ideology, egoism, racism, convenience and hypocrisy have tried to hide from us all. Helping rid us of stereotypes about a people, it portrays their struggles and points out their weaknesses; it restores their dignity and locates their place in history.