Why the Chicano Moratorium Still Matters

Today marks the 55th anniversary of the National Chicano Moratorium Against the War, in which 25,000 Chican@s marched through the streets of East Los Angeles to protest the high mortality rate of Chicano soldiers in the Vietnam War and the oppression and inequality we suffered “at home” in our barrios and colonias.

The Moratorium was organized by a diverse committee of young Chicano activists—revolutionary nationalists, socialists, and (developing) communists—who represented the growing influence of radical and revolutionary leadership in the Chicano liberation struggle. The Brown Berets, the Black Berets, La Raza Unida Party, the Crusade for Justice, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, members of the Communist Party, Los Siete de La Raza, and others were all involved. In this sense, the Chicano Movement was connecting and identifying itself with the Black Power Movement, the American Indian Movement, and other radical social movements, especially of oppressed people of color, as well as with the anti-imperialist movements taking place at the time in Latino America, Africa, and Asia.

The 1970 Chicano Moratorium was the largest mass action in our history until the marches against Proposition 187 in California in the 1990s. It rallied youth, adults, students, professionals, academics, and small-business owners.

But in many ways, the Moratorium was most especially a festival of our working class. The overwhelming majority of those who attended were working people—campesinos, mechanics, janitors, factory workers, domestic workers, food servers, and teachers.

The working-class presence reflected not only the growing influence of radical organizing in our movement but also that our people were “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” They were fed up with the way we were brutalized by the police, by the way our lands had been stolen, by the poor housing, poor schools, poor health care, and poverty that we suffered in disproportionate numbers, the denial of our voting rights, our outrageous underrepresentation in political office, academia, the media, and the business world, and by the continued repression and denigration of our language and culture.

The Moratorium gave a massive and powerful voice to our people under the slogan “Our Fight Is In the Barrio, Not In Vietnam.”

The Moratorium was a peaceful event, but that did not prevent it from being attacked by a massive phalanx of Los Angeles police and sheriffs, who waded into the crowd of men, women, children, grandparents, and babies with batons, tear gas, and shotguns at the ready. Four people died from that violence on August 29, including well-known journalist Ruben Salazar, who had taken refuge from the brutal police assault on the march in a nearby cantina, a refuge that did not prevent his murder from a tear gas canister recklessly fired into the establishment.

And as had always been the case when the police, sheriffs, Texas Rangers, or the Migra murdered our people, no one was held accountable, a familiar tale that continues to be told in barrios throughout California and the Southwest.

It is essential that we continue to celebrate and commemorate the Chicano Moratorium. We are the keepers of our own history; we can’t rely on our schools and our mass media to tell these stories, except in the most minimal or stereotypical ways.

But equally important are the relevant lessons of the Moratorium for our struggle today, when the president of the United States characterizes our population as “murderers and rapists” and unleashes an ethnic cleansing campaign against millions of our sisters and brothers; when our communities continue to be poisoned by horrendous toxins and pollutants; when the police continue to murder us in the streets; and when we continue to fill the jails and prisons instead of the colleges and universities.

I would argue that the most important lesson from the Moratorium is the need for unity within our movement. If we are going to ever achieve genuine equality, democracy, and our national rights as a people, we must find common ground. We must “unite all who can be united” against the white supremacist capitalist system has doubled down on our oppression.

Another important lesson is to prioritize the organizing of our working class. Working people make up the majority of our community, and they who suffer the most from our racist society. The liberation of the Chican@ people is impossible if our struggle does not include the broad participation and leadership of our workers.

Thirdly, the Moratorium taught us to be internationalists. Our march in 1970 was a critical element of the US anti-war movement and contributed to the end of that horrible conflict. This is a lesson we can learn today as the US government foments golpes in nations like Bolivia, threatens military intervention in Venezuela, continues its blockade of Cuba, and imposes economic and political pressure on Mexico to support its anti-immigrant policies.

The Chicano Moratorium is truly a “fire that will never die”—an inspiration to our continuing struggle for our national rights, for Tierra y Libertad.

La Lucha: Sigue… ¡Sigue!