The Chicano Rallying Cry

For more than 100 years, they were Americans in name only. . . . Mexican Americans were denied the rights of other citizens, and many were stripped of their land.

In the 1960s a new generation of leaders came forward and fought for change. They called themselves Chicanos--an ancient Mexican word that describes the “poorest of the poor.” But they wore the name with pride.

They walked out of fields and demanded a fair wage. They walked out of schools and demanded better education. They formed a political party and demanded full citizenship. . . .

Such is the stark narrative opening of “Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement,” a four-hour series airing on PBS the next two Friday nights, the first television series to explore in depth the struggle of the Mexican American people for equality, identity and just plain respect from the nation’s majority.

It comes nine years after “Eyes on the Prize,” the acclaimed series on the black civil rights movement--broadcast in 1987 in six parts, then followed in 1990 by an eight-part sequel, “Eyes on the Prize II.”

Amid the current wave of English-only rallying cries, Buchananism and immigrant bashing-- which took another turn last week when Riverside County sheriff’s deputies were caught on video clubbing a man and woman suspected of being illegal immigrants--the producers of “Chicano!” and many of its participants hope it will resonate the way “Eyes on the Prize” did. That “Chicano!” is airing in the spring of this election year is no accident.

“It was our call,” says executive producer Jose Luis Ruiz at the National Latino Communications Center in Los Angeles, a nonprofit media arts and production organization that co-produced the series with Galan Productions Inc. of Austin, Tex., in association with KCET-TV Channel 28. “I hope it will inspire people to participate and to get out and vote, Republican or Democrat. Especially Mexican Americans--to put a much higher value on their ability to cast a vote in this country.”

Indeed, “Chicano!” owes its existence to “Eyes on the Prize”--for showing that a series on civil rights could be made and for underscoring the counterpoint that the Mexican American experience had not been dealt with.

“We felt left out,” Ruiz says. “Civil rights in this country does not belong to one group. It’s been a struggle for almost every immigrant or indigenous group, from the Irish to the Jews to the African Americans. . . . How wonderful it was that the African Americans had done [“Eyes”]. It emphasized the importance for us not to forget our history. We have not done a good job in teaching our children, and in teaching others, that we are not on a level playing field.

“We’re in a land that was once Mexico,” he adds, “and we’re still fighting for our civil rights. If [Pat] Buchanan had his way, I’m sure he’d love to deport us all.”

Just the way, Ruiz notes, that documented Mexican immigrants, some with American-born children, were encouraged to repatriate back to Mexico during the Depression in the 1930s and others, mostly undocumented, were swept up and deported in “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s.

“There are a lot of attitudes out there,” Ruiz says of last week’s incident, one of them being that people who “come here illegally have no rights. Certainly I think [sheriff’s deputies] violated these people’s civil rights. The question in our series pertains to American citizens--or legal residents--who did not commit a crime. A crime was being committed against them because their constitutional rights were taken away from them as Americans.”

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry G. Cisneros--the series’ narrator and the first Latino to become mayor of a major U.S. city when he won election in San Antonio in 1981--believes that “Chicano!” is perfectly timed.

“The only answer to some of the division and hatred and immigrant bashing is to face it down with the truth,” Cisneros says. “There isn’t a way to soft sell history. You just have to lay it out there.”

‘Chicano!” focuses on the tumultuous years 1965 to 1975, the apex of the movement. 1965 was when Cesar Chavez started organizing the farm workers in the fields of Delano, Calif., which sparked a national protest and a cultural renaissance. The word “Chicano” began to take on political meaning, and banners proclaimed “Brown Is Beautiful.”

And 1975 essentially marked the end of La Raza Unida, a Mexican American political party organized in Texas in 1970, which had spread to California and other states.

The series, featuring witness accounts interspersed with video footage and photographs of the era, is not a perfectly balanced, academic treatise, but then, Ruiz says, “I don’t think ‘Eyes’ [was] either.” It has a point of view, though it does present opposing viewpoints; its facts were double-sourced, then vetted by a team of scholars.

“I look at it more as stories from the movement,” says Hector Galan, the series producer. “It’s not your straight-news, public-affairs approach. If anything, it’s a more interesting way of telling history, the way [PBS’] ‘American Experience’ does.”

“Chicano!” is divided into four hours: “Quest for a Homeland,” which begins in northern New Mexico in 1966 as some Mexican Americans try to enforce the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had guaranteed certain lands after the Mexican War; “Struggle in the Fields” and Chavez; “Taking Back the Schools,” about the 1968 high school walkouts in East Los Angeles, when 15,000 left their classrooms to protest what they considered inadequate education; and “Fighting for Political Power,” about La Raza Unida and its legacies.

While the Mexican American movement was influenced by and intersected with the black civil rights movement, “Chicano!” shows that it had its own roots, issues and leaders.

At its heart was Chavez, who after five years, a hunger strike and an international grape boycott, successfully led his United Farm Workers to contracts with growers in the San Joaquin and Coachella valleys. Taking inspiration from Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he lived by a credo of nonviolence and made his cause racially inclusive. “We’re fighting for recognition,” he says in one clip, “which is the real guts of it.”

There were other, less well-known leaders, such as Corky Gonzales of Denver, at one time the third-ranked world featherweight boxer, who linked his Crusade for Justice to the Poor People’s Campaign and gave voice to the Chicano movement with an epic poem, “I Am Joaquin.”

Sal Castro, then a young history teacher at Lincoln High, was a leader of the 1968 walkouts. He became one of the East Los Angeles 13, arrested for conspiracy, and his reinstatement as a teacher that fall became a cause celebre. Two years later, charges against the 13 were dropped on appeal.

Influential women in the movement included Dolores Huerta, Chavez’s right-hand official in the United Farm Workers, and those who not only registered voters in Texas but also insisted on having policy-making roles.

As “Chicano!” shows, the movement encompassed a broad spectrum of people and issues. The first hour shows a group of New Mexicans storming a courthouse over the issue of land rights; the second shows 3,000 farm workers praying peacefully at a Kern County courthouse for the release of Chavez. There is footage of Brown Berets from Los Angeles, arms raised in clenched fists, and of a Texas cheerleader, arms raised in joy after a student walkout helped break the limit of one Mexican American permitted on the Crystal City High School cheerleader squad.

Statistics showing the plight of Mexican Americans pepper “Chicano!”: In the mid-1960s, half of all Mexican Americans had less than eight years of education. A third lived in poverty. In 1967, only four Mexican Americans served in Congress. The average life expectancy for farm workers was 49 years. In the Southwest, Mexican Americans made up 12% of the population but, according to many studies, accounted for 20% of the U.S. military deaths in Vietnam.

The legacy of the movement, the producers indicate, is mixed. It had its successes, particularly in encouraging Mexican Americans to go on to college and into the professions and politics. Since 1975, the series points out, 5,000 Latinos have been elected to office.

Yet, Ruiz suggests, the “biggest failure was our inability to institutionalize the ideas and concepts of the movement.”

“We should have created our own schools--if nothing else for two hours when our kids get out of school,” he says. “We would have kept them off the street, helped to lower drug rates, [teen] pregnancy, everything.”

He believes “Chicano!” has relevance for today: “People are more aware of the present than they are of the past, and I just want to make sure they have a point of reference. . . . [People] can fight, they can win. Things do not have to be the way they are.”

Making “Chicano!” proved to be a struggle of its own--primarily for money.

While the idea for a Chicano series had been kicking around for years, the producers geared up in 1989 after Congress directed the Corp. for Public Broadcasting to establish an Independent Television Service and set aside $3 million for minority programming.

Ultimately the producers raised $2.2 million for “Chicano!” The major contributors include the Ford Foundation, $700,000; the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, $450,000; PBS and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, $350,000 each; and the Rockefeller Foundation, $250,000.

But the producers were never able to get a corporate underwriter to sign on.

“It’s a tough sell to corporate America,” Ruiz says. “They probably are afraid they may alienate some customers by using the word ‘Chicano,’ and I don’t think civil rights is something you package up and identify with [as with] ‘Barney’ or ‘Baseball’ or ‘Civil War.’ ”

So strapped were the producers to raise an additional $700,000 for educational materials to be used in conjunction with the series that KCET ran a special telethon. It brought in $100,000; most of the rest came from foundations.

With more money, the producers could have added episodes and would not have had to condense stories, particularly in the first hour, which also covers the fateful 1970 Vietnam Moratorium in L.A.

“Too much history, not enough money, not enough time,” Ruiz says.

Now he trusts that the final product will be its own reward--that corporations will understand its importance. And put up money for “Chicano! II.”

Three weeks ago, Los Angeles Board of Education member Victoria Castro was in the audience at the Japan America Theater, viewing a screening of the “Chicano!” episode on schools. Castro, who had been a leader of the 1968 walkouts, says that she experienced “moments of depression”--the district still has a high dropout rate--and that it was painful to see the police scenes: “You see a kid trying to defend a friend pulled aside and beaten up.”

Yet overall the program “touched my heart,” she said.

“It was like being validated. It gives me a real self-satisfaction that somebody documented what happened at that time.”

Movie producer Moctesuma Esparza (“Milagro Beanfield War,” the coming movie on Selena)--a key participant in the movement--says that after seeing the rough cut, “I thought it was too short.”

“Having lived through the experience, I greatly bemoan the fact that public broadcasting did not see fit to allow for all the footage that has been compiled, all the information that would give the American public an insight into what has happened to 30 million people historically. . . . There are wonderful things about our culture that the American culture would benefit more from. ‘Family values’ is not a political slogan for us.”

Sal Castro, now a counselor and history teacher at Belmont High School downtown, sees sad irony in the fact that Chicano studies, one of the demands of the 1968 student walkouts, is not taught at most schools. Such elective courses were dropped, he says, when requirements to get into state universities were raised.

Castro, who is still an activist--he was on ABC’s “Nightline” recently, defending schooling for children of illegal immigrants--hopes the series “opens the eyes of people across the country.”

“Bashing is done in part because of the lack of awareness of what the Mexican has done,” he says. “ . . . A kid picks up an American history book. Who are his role models besides Cesar Chavez?”

Amalia Mesa-Bains, an art theorist and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship, hopes viewers come away understanding that “we are not newcomers, we are not foreigners.” If the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been “lived up to in the ethical sense of its import, we would not be debating immigration. We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”

Huerta, of the United Farm Workers, says that in the current political climate and with the influx of new immigrants, “it’s almost like repeating what happened in the ‘50s [and] you have to go back to community organizing again.”

When producer Ruiz, 51, was growing up in East L.A., he and other Mexican Americans were not allowed to swim in the Montebello pool until the last day of the season. “Why? Because they drained the pool the next day.” His mother’s fast-food business had a sign that read “Fine Spanish Food.” “We could not say Mexican food in those days. ‘Mexican’ was dirty.”

Today, he still has friends who say, “Oh, you’re Spanish.”

“No, I’m Mexican ancestry,” he says.

“Well, I don’t want to offend.”

“That’s not an offense,” Ruiz replies.

Perhaps “Chicano!” will drive that point home.

* “Chicano! “ airs Friday and April 19 at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.