The Brown Berets: The Chicano Movement

the Brown Berets are a militaristic group that was supplanted within the Chicano Movement whose most popular events spanned the era of the 1960s and 1970s. The Chicano Movement, or “El movimiento” as it was termed was both a cultural and political movement used to engage in activism for the struggling Mexican American population. The use of the word Chicano in reference to this group, is pertinent because Chicano was adopted as a formerly derogatory term and was reshaped to mean a new radicalized racial identity of its Mexican-American participants who no longer wished to have any connection to “American ideology, or the word American” because it was “connoted with assimilation to the oppressive forces of American institutions” that Chicanos

felt had failed them. (Correa p.2) The theme of radicalization and dissent from these oppressive forces played greatly into importance of both the founding and maintaining of the of the Brown Beret Organization. The Chicano Movement encompassed several movements but in reference specifically to the Brown Beret Organization the demand for access to ‘empowerment’ of the Mexican American youth via education and political activism is one of its most notable facets.

(Ramirez) In this research paper I hope to take a closer look at the the militancy of the organization and the issues it faced with its radical notions and its pursuit of empowerment for the education of the Mexican American youth.

Historically, in terms of the context of the Chicano Movement that created the Brown Berets one can first look specifically at Los Angeles, California and the interactions of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) with racial minorities in general for the context that provided a platform for the formation of militant opposition. The Chicano Movement developed in response to historically unique grievances of the Mexican American community but it did not occur in a vacuum separate from the Black Civil Rights Movement. The Watts Riot of August 1965 provides a small insight into the accumulation of overt police violence that was occurring in the Los Angeles area. The violent arrest of Marquette Frye caused riots to ensue for six days in

the Watts neighborhood and “resulted in more than forty million dollars worth of property damage” and was considered one of the largest outbreaks of civil unrest between the LAPD and African Americans in South Central Los Angeles. (Stanford Encyclopedia) In reflection of such an occurrence the Black Civil Rights Movement showed, among various veins of protest, the evolvement of a Black Power Movement that found reciprocity within urban rebellions such as the Watts Riot. (Escobar 1487) Specifically the Black Power Movement’s contribution to the activist community was its solidarity through Black Nationalism, an ideology of unity and self determination through a stringent separation from European society and its facets, similar to the nationalist concept of “chicanismo” which rejected assimilation of the Mexican American plight. (Escobar 1491) The “militant rhetoric” and “confrontational tactics” of members of the Black Power Movement, like the Black Panthers, is accredited with providing both an ideological underpinning and form of radicalized public protest that influenced “[Chicano Activism] by focusing public attention on the issue of racial discrimination and legitimizing for other non-white groups” (Escobar 1497). Chicanos, took specifically from the Black Power Movement, the use of “racial identity as a source of pride and a vehicle for political mobilization” and emulated similar African American sentiments of discrimination. The Chicano Movement of the late 1960s however was experiencing discrimination on a level that was more heavily regulated than Black power movement, specifically because the LAPD’s ideological bias had already been predisposed via enacted hostility towards Black Civil Rights Protest in the early 1960s. (Escobar 1465)
The Chicano Movement’s “creation” of the Brown Berets did not begin without its precursor agitations. In 1966, a group known as the Young Citizens for Community Action (YCCA) was formulated under the guise of Los Angeles’ Mayor Sam Yorty with the original intent of “[easing] the strained relationships existing between the community and the police department” by creating a student run “Youth Council” that assisted with mayoral and school board elections, community service work, and raising food for farm workers. (Hernandez) It’s purpose was to act as an alleviation of tensions between the pockets of civil unrest that had plagued the 1960s. At the time Los Angeles, California had the highest concentration of Mexican Americans of any city and the Los Angeles metropolitan area showed; “the "Spanish surname" population in the county jumped from 576,000 (9.54 percent of the total) in I960 to 1,289,000 (17.24 percent) in 1970 and that in the city itself it had jumped from from 260,000 (10.5 percent) in I960 to 545,000 (19.4 percent) in 1970” the largest concentration of this population, lived the section known as East Los Angeles. (Escobar 1495) The YCCA was based primarily in East Los Angeles and took up a concern for the education of Mexican American youth including the deficiencies within school facilities, lack of books, and charges of racism among administrators and teachers. (Chicano!) In the winter of 1967, the YCCA opened a coffeehouse called “La Piranya” in East Los Angeles in order to “attract teenagers and [provide them with an alternative] to hanging out on the streets” and discussed amongst the group their grievances with the lack of educational resources for Mexican American youth. (Hernandez) However, it was reported by La Raza newspaper, that the LAPD sheriff's deputies began stopping and searching people who entered La Piranya and “began arresting underage coffeehouse patrons [on the grounds of] curfew violations” and were telling the parents of the students that they were “Communists, dope pushes, or addicts” and sending them away or with juvenile sentences. (Correa 39) This surmounting pressure to oppresses the YCCA became the springboard for which the organization began its transcendence into rigidity and militance of an activist group. David Sanchez, one of founding members of the YCCA, explained in an interview that he was “jumped by the ‘fuzz’ ” i.e. he was knocked out by two Sheriff's deputies and when he awoke he was being arrested at La Piranya. It was this injustice that prompted him as well as other members of the group into thinking that “something was wrong with American society” and specifically there was a bigger need for organizing the Mexican American youth of the barrios of Los Angeles. (Hernandez)
Radical politicization of the YCCA began in 1967, when some of the members of the group began to change the style of dress, and the labeling of the group, to reflect the militancy that they wished to emulate. (Kapoor) In an interview taken from Cruz Olmeda, a former member of the Brown Berets, he asked why the name of the Brown Berets was adopted:
We asked him why are you designing an emblem? He said, ‘Look, it’s like an emblem for guerillas…a symbol of guerillas, and in this case like 49 urban guerillas.’ He started telling us how they were green berets, how the French guerillas and the Spanish guerillas had worn it during the Spanish Civil War and that we should wear a brown beret. So, we thought it was a good idea. So we started wearing the brown beret and the khaki jacket – the bush jacket. But we didn’t call ourselves the Brown Berets. Those who started calling us the Brown Berets were the East L.A. Sheriff’s…and we got pissed off. We would hear it because every time they had us up against the wall we’d hear all the radio messages from the patrol car's, ‘Brown Berets here’ and Brown Berets over here,’ and so then it stuck. So, then we just stayed with it. (Correa p.78)
After this change in demeanor the YCCA became known as the Brown Berets and began staging themselves instead as “self-defense unit for the Chicano community as whole” and began promoting the need for sponsored political education and the need for Chicano history classes in retaliation to the police brutality they faced. (Espinoza) The original Brown Beret chapter of East Los Angeles was comprised of both young men and women, a milieu of both gang youth and of the educated activists of the YCCA who were attracted by a sense of “camaraderie of the group and a desire to do something for ‘la raza’” and given the segregated context in which this impoverished youth lived, this traction was not as hard to garner. (Montejo) Making a paramilitary organization out of both the receptors of the barrio and the college activists after feelings of police malpractice banded together both an agitated political activist community of college undergrads and a barrio community of street gangs that inherently felt the strife of wanting to break away from the conformist stereotypes .The group began to structure itself around the issues of protecting the sovereignty of the Mexican American community and specifically from an educational standpoint. Ralph Ramirez and Carlos Montes both described the organization as “ideally reaching out to young homeboys—cholos or batos locos—who embodied racialized, poor or working-class masculinity; [as these] were typically young men who had been defeated by society or led astray by drugs, alcohol, and gang warfare” these barrio dwellers were those who were most exposed to, the issue most salient to the former YCCA ,a mistreatment and neglect by systems both of legal authority and of the school systems. (Espinoza p.24)
In East Los Angeles the dropout rate in schools was about 50% and the educational programs were “insensitive to the needs, of the Mexican American population population [...] causing a frustration level to rise and resentment to grip the Chicano community”; in March of 1968, a full two years after the inception of the Brown Beret group there was talk of a high school protests.

(Kapoor) In an interview, Carlos Montes explains “[The Brown Berets] started agitating for bilingual education, better school conditions, Chicano studies and more Chicano teachers. [The Brown Berets began attending] community, school and youth meetings to raise demands for better educational and school conditions. This finally led to the historic East L.A. high school walkouts in March of 1968” thousands of high school aged Chicano youth from four predominantly Latino high schools in the Eastside over a two week period protested and Montes refers to this movement as one of the most notable and climactic victories of the Brown Berets in their prime of the late 1960s. (Staff) The Brown Berets cultivated a informed structural powerhouse that served to provide youth with a sense of purpose via training and group structure but also it created an activist group aimed at providing protection for the ten thousands of students who wished to champion for Chicano

education.
In late 1967, teacher Sal Castro along with student leaders and groups such as United Mexican American Students (UMAS) and the Brown Berets, developed “thirty six demands to bring the [Los Angeles] Board of Education” for the injustices they felt they were being targeted with and when their needs were not met by the Board, the students threatened walkouts which were called they called “Blowouts”. (Contreras) These blowout protests aimed to threatened the schools based on targeting them financially; since public schools are paid based on the number of students in class each day, the students would leave homeroom before attendance was taken. The Brown Berets contributed to the LA walkouts that occurred systematically through three high school walkouts by providing protection and help during the police altercations that occurred with the students of three East LA high schools. They were seen as a vanguard point for