Protest, repression, and race: legal violence and the Chicano movement.

• Author: Lopez, Ian F. Haney

INTRODUCTION

Until the late 1960s, the Mexican community in the United States thought of itself as racially White. (1) That is not how Anglos thought of Mexicans, of course. Largely beginning with the nineteenth-century period of intense Anglo-Mexican conflict in the Southwest, Anglo society perceived Mexicans as racially separate and inferior. (2) By the 1920s, the Mexican community responded to this negative racialization by insisting that they were White. (3) Leaders of the community claimed that Mexicans were Caucasian and thus White biologically, deserving the same social status and civic position as the White group. (4) This belief in a White identity predominated among those who came to call themselves Mexican Americans. (5) To some extent, members of this political generation successfully demanded from Anglo society recognition of their claims to a White identity. (6) To take one example, although the U.S. Census Bureau enumerated a "Mexican race" in 1930, the Bureau bowed to political pressure from the Mexican community thereafter and in 1950 and 1960 counted that group as "White Persons of Spanish Surname." (7) Despite these gains, in the late 1960s a large segment of the Mexican community reversed its racial self-conception, proclaiming a non-White identity. One of the hallmarks of the Chicano movement of that period was the assertion, still widely subscribed to today, that Mexicans form a separate race from Whites.

How did this transformation occur? Why did an emphasis on non-Whiteness arise in the late 1960s, when the community had fervently claimed a White identity during the relatively more racist 1940s and 1950s, and had even made some progress in garnering official recognition of Mexican Whiteness? Was the claim of non-Whiteness a strategic choice, or did it reflect genuine conviction?

This Article explores these questions in the context of a particular criminal case that arose in East Los Angeles in 1968. In one week in late March 1968, over 10,000 students walked out of high schools serving the overwhelmingly Mexican East Los Angeles area. Some scholars mark this protest against terrible school conditions as the inception of the Chicano movement. (8) The Los Angeles grand jury indicted thirteen activists on charges ranging from disturbing the peace to conspiracy for their roles in supporting the student protests. (9) Many of the defendants were initially arrested and held without bail; they each faced possible sentences of forty-five years in jail. In what would be conducted as a political showpiece, the defense, led by a volatile attorney, Oscar Acosta, argued that the indictments were unconstitutional because the local judges had discriminated against Mexicans in selecting members of the indicting grand jury. (10) The defendants in what came to be known as East LA Thirteen publicly denounced the trial as an exercise of judicial bigotry. (11)

This case illustrates the shifting nature of Mexican racial identity during this period. It also highlights the role of law, and legal violence in particular, in the evolving racialization of Mexicans as nonWhite. I contend in this Article that legal violence, encompassing both judicial mistreatment and police brutality, substantially contributed to the emergence of a Chicano movement that stressed a nonWhite Mexican identity.

The discussion in Part II summarizes recent developments in the study of social movements. Part III considers the role of the African-American struggle for equality in laying the groundwork for the Chicano movement. The largest section, Part IV, considers the particular contribution of legal violence to Chicano racial formation. Before turning to the principal text, though, a comment on nomenclature is required.

The term "Mexican" refers here generally to all permanent immigrants to the United States from Mexico and their descendants, as well as to persons descended from Mexican inhabitants of the southwestern region acquired in the mid-nineteenth century by the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. (12) This term makes no distinction on the basis of citizenship. I employ this label in order to reserve for more particular usage the terms "Mexican American" and "Chicano." "Mexican American" became a popular designation among members of the Mexican community beginning in the late 1920s. Although to some extent it has lost any racial connotation, historically "Mexican American" arose as a term of self-description that carried with it an assimilationist ideology and an explicit claim to White racial identity. (13) In this Article I use "Mexican American" when referring to members of the Mexican community whose social, political, and racial commitments include a subscription to the idea that Mexicans are White. "Chicano" became a common identification during the late 1960s, especially among those who rejected the prior assimilationist orientation of the Mexican community. The term "Chicano" incorporated an assertion that Mexicans constituted a nonWhite race. (14) As with "Mexican American," I use "Chicano" as a label for those who subscribe to specific racial claims, here non-Whiteness. Correspondingly, I seek to use "Mexican" in a manner that does not imply a specific conception of racial identity. "Mexican" serves as a default label bearing no specific racial connotations. (15)

My index of different terms to the various racial valences associated with Mexican identity is uncommon. Few scholars make a similarly sharp distinction in usage, and among those who refer to themselves as Chicano or Mexican-American, significant variation exists regarding the nature of any implicit racial claims. Indeed, currently Chicano and Mexican-American often serve as synonyms. Nevertheless, using these labels in a manner that emphasizes their original racial connotations adds clarity to my overall discussion, and sharpens the argument that racial identity is a social, and sometimes legal, construction.

1. SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY

   The development of a non-White identity within the Mexican community arose with the Chicano movement, an episode of broad political and cultural mobilization that can be partly explained by social movement theory. A quick overview of social movement theory in the United States is useful here. The classical scholarship of social insurgency stressed the importance of profound grievances. (16) This model was criticized, first, because social movements often failed to occur even in the presence of significant social stress, and second, because the model relied on such extreme psychological responses as anomie, anxiety, and rage as the behavioral antecedents of social movements. (17) In response to these criticisms, students of social movements turned to accounts that emphasized resource mobilization, which stressed not simply the importance of external pressures, but also the necessity of local organizational resources. (18) The resource mobilization model argued that external grievances were necessary, but not a sufficient cause in the absence of an ability to mount sustained challenges to the established social order. (19) Under this model, technical skills, organizational density, capital, personal networks, and the political space in which to organize were all identified as important precursors to successful mobilization. The resource approach did not picture social insurgents as persons in the throes of heightened psychological states, but saw social movement activists as rational actors. (20)

   Current social movement theory continues to build on the resource mobilization model, but now posits that ideational resources may be as important as, or even more important than, organizational resources in explaining the rise of social movements. (21) Reflecting the cognitive turn in the social sciences generally, the current generation of American social movement theorists emphasizes the importance of social cognition as an aspect of political insurgency. Sidney Tarrow stresses "cycles of protest" and "repertoires" in order to draw attention to the way in which social movements tend to follow patterns determined in part by learning curves among social actors. (22) Doug McAdam uses the language of "initiator" and "spinoff" or "imitator" movements to indicate that later activists adopt the lessons taught by early insurgents. (23) "[M]ost social movements," McAdam argues, "are caused by other social movements and the tactical, organizational, and ideological tools they afford later struggles." (24) Adopting a social constructionist approach, David Snow and Robert Benford draw heavily on the work of Erving Goffman to insist upon the importance of "framing." (25) Snow and Benford, among many now, argue that the development of social movements depends to a considerable degree on innovations in the conceptualization of certain key problems, in particular regarding the nature of grievances, visions of potential futures, and, most importantly here, understandings of group identity. (26) Current movement theorists posit that group identity exists in a dialectical relationship with social activism, with reconceptualizations of identity serving as spurs to insurgency, and in turn, with mobilization contributing to the development of new collective identities. (27) The construction of collective identity is now understood to be a major antecedent to, as well as a significant accomplishment of, social movements. (28)

   The recent emphases on initiator movements and identity framing are especially helpful in considering the Chicano movement. The remaking of Mexican group identity provided the basis for political mobilization in East Los Angeles. Yet, the Mexican community's turn to race as a basis of group identity cannot be understood except by reference to the African-American struggle for social and political equality as an initiator movement. Two particular aspects of the Black struggle greatly influenced the...