Sowing the Seeds of Resistance: The Mexican American Struggle for Political Power, the Rise of the Young Barrio Intellectuals, and Police-State Violence in Los Angeles, 1939-1972

Abstract

This dissertation explores Mexican American political struggle in Los Angeles from 1939 to 1972. The dissertation begins with an examination of Carta Editorial, an alternative Mexican American periodical, which emerged as a counternarrative response to the bias reporting of the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, La Opinion, and other establishment newspapers, which did not portray the Mexican-origin community objectively or fairly. Carta Editorial was a voice for equality, a voice for empowerment, a voice for representation and ultimately a voice for Mexican American liberation. The dissertation then assesses the first six Mexican American Youth Leadership Conferences from 1963 to 1968, emphasizing the themes, dialogues, central figures, and their implications for Chicana and Chicano youth identity, cultural awareness, political consciousness, and community mobilization prior to the historic East Los Angeles High School Walkouts in March 1968. The Mexican American Youth Leadership Conferences were paramount to bringing about the sociopolitical conditions conducive to an emergent generation of young barrio intellectuals. The youth organization that epitomized the ascent of young barrio intellectuals were the Young Citizens for Community Action (YCCA). Despite its short existence, the dissertation argues that YCCA were a pivotal organization in leading and influencing the consciousness raising efforts amongst Mexican-origin youths to organize against a century of educational neglect and police brutality. YCCA aggregated Mexican-origin political heritage of community organizing by cultivating a new framework for youth empowerment and civil rights. During the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana and Chicano activists confronted racial oppression, economic inequality, and sexism on the home front and U.S. imperialistic policies abroad. Amid the Mexican-origin urban rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana and Chicano barrio 8 intellectuals self-determined to control their histories, identities, and experiences. As a result of the heightened political activism among young Chicanas and Chicanos, Los Angeles civic leaders, including the Los Angeles Times, elected officials, and police agencies, identified politicized Mexican Americans as a threat to the status quo. The dissertation provides an overview of state-sanctioned police violence against the Los Angeles Mexican-origin community. In accentuating the genealogy of police-community conflict in Los Angeles, the dissertation describes the convergence of the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles police agencies in criminalizing Mexican-origin youths first as juvenile delinquents in the 1940s and then as subversives in the 1960s. To understand why state-sanctioned police brutality persists, the dissertation appraises the Los Angeles Times’ archives revealing that the influential and powerful daily did not hesitate to absolve the police of charges of brutality and misconduct by editorializing and reporting that holding the police accountable for their misdeeds would lead to low morale conditions among police officers. The dissertation ends with an inquiry of the four known police infiltrators and informants who disrupted Chicano Movement activities between 1967 and 1972. I also appraise the Grand Jury Inquest into the East Los Angeles High School Walkouts in 1968 and the Carlos Montes Trial in 1979. Notably, the dissertation probes how the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation targeted Chicano Movement activists through surveillance, infiltration, intimidation, threats of violence, harassment, and disruption of constitutionally protected rights. Police forces sought to destroy the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles to maintain white supremacy.