Why we should respect the Chicano Moratorium on War

Today, August 29, marks the 54th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, a 25,000-person march and rally that took place in East Los Angeles, home to the largest concentration of Chicanos/Mexican-Americans in the United States. The peaceful moratorium march and rally were brutally attacked by an army of 500 Los Angeles sheriffs, who attacked the rally participants with tear gas and batons, injured dozens of Chicanos, arrested and murdered approximately 200 people Los Angeles Times Journalist Ruben Salazar, Brown Beret medic Lyn Ward, and Brown Beret member Angel Gilberto Diaz. All of these victims were unarmed. No sheriff was ever held criminally responsible for this horrific attack on this peaceful event.

Like many important historical events in the Chicano freedom struggle, the Moratorium has been largely ignored by both mainstream and progressive media, and is certainly absent from history classes in California public schools. This general failure to recognize and teach Chicano history is especially significant today, as the Chicano population in California numbers over 12 million and over 34 million in the United States as a whole.

While many Chicano activists and leaders remember the brutal attack on the Moratorium, we often forget the many important aspects that make this Moratorium such a remarkable historical event – ​​both as a part of Mexican American history and as a part of the history of progressive movements in the United States in general.

First, it was the largest ethnically-focused antiwar action during the broad and diverse nationwide movement against the U.S. war on Vietnam. While there were several much larger antiwar actions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was the first and only action organized and led by a racially oppressed community. In fact, the large moratorium in East Los Angeles was one of 20 such actions organized in cities such as Albuquerque, Houston, Denver, Chicago, Douglas, Arizona, and cities throughout California. These events demonstrated the broad and growing opposition of Chicanos to the U.S. war on Vietnam, a trend that, according to the Henry Kissinger biography The price of powershocked the Nixon White House, which succumbed to the widespread illusion that Chicanos were guided by a kind of blind patriotism and conservatism that distinguished them from the seemingly more radical black freedom movement.

Second, the Moratorium was, at the time, the largest mass mobilization in the history of a resistance movement that began almost immediately after the U.S. annexation of Mexico’s northern territories in the 1840s. Third, the Moratorium demonstrated that the younger radical leaders of this movement had a real following among the general Chicano population and were not just a small group of disaffected youth and students. The East Los Angeles event and other Moratorium actions were organized by the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, which included younger revolutionary nationalists such as the Brown Berets and the Colorado-based Crusade for Justice, members of the Communist Party, and militant women’s groups such as Las Adelitas de Aztlan, with strong support from the radical Black Berets of San Jose, New Mexico.

While the moratorium contained common demands of the anti-war movement, such as the rejection of conscription (“Chale Con rl Design“), but also promoted unique slogans such as “Our war is not in Vietnam, but in our barrios,” which explicitly combined a strong sense of international solidarity with the recognition that our two peoples shared a common oppressor—one that imprisoned us in segregated neighborhoods, poor schools, police brutality, low-wage labor, and suppression of our language and culture, and expected us to fight its terrible war against the poor, agrarian country of Vietnam. The moratorium highlighted the ironic reality that Chicano troops in Vietnam had among the highest casualty rates among the U.S. armed forces, while simultaneously suffering double-digit dropout and displacement rates, high mass incarceration rates, and minimal access to higher education.

Another important feature of the Chicano Moratorium was that it brought together a broad cross-section of our community: older and younger generations, business people, professionals, artists and musicians, factory workers and construction workers. Yet despite all this diversity, the Chicano Moratorium was overwhelmingly made up of workers, participants who represented the majority of our community – working people who are the bedrock of the economy of Los Angeles – the second richest urban economy in the world. The Moratorium is an example of both the power our community has when united and the remarkable political consciousness and courage of our working class.

Finally, we should never forget that the moratorium was also strongly supported by many other communities: Native Americans, African Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and whites. It was a true rainbow coalition of support for our resistance movement.

These are just a few of the reasons why this holiday remains a key holiday in the Chicano freedom movement—one that is celebrated every year in Los Angeles and throughout the Southwest. We can learn many important lessons from this history, lessons that are incredibly relevant at a time when Donald Trump and the Republican Party are promising to launch a massive ethnic cleansing campaign against illegal immigrants, the vast majority of whom live in our communities. Now more than ever, it is important for our community to unite, set aside unimportant differences, and build a powerful movement that can effectively confront the fascist threat posed by Trump and his cohorts, and we should center in this movement the voice and leadership of working people, the salt of the earth that gives our cry for freedom powerful social resonance. If that’s possible!