05b – Chicano

Chicano! Documentary (1996)

Also search library website for free Kanopy stream with Closed Captions

https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/video/chicano-episode-1-quest-homeland

Valerie Mendoza review of the documentary series

https://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol3/chicano/chicano.html

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Armando Navarro. Mexican American Youth Organization : Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas. Vol. 1st ed. Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press, 1995. Search library for ebook.

Among the protest movements of the 1960s, the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) emerged as one of the principal Chicano organizations seeking social change. By the time MAYO evolved into the Raza Unida Party (RUP) in 1972, its influence had spread far beyond its Crystal City, Texas, origins. Its members precipitated some thirty-nine school walkouts, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and confronted church and governmental bodies on numerous occasions.Armando Navarro here offers the first comprehensive assessment of MAYO’s history, politics, leadership, ideology, strategies and tactics, and activist program. Interviews with many MAYO and RUP organizers and members, as well as first-hand knowledge drawn from his own participation in meetings, presentations, and rallies, enrich the text.This wealth of material yields the first reliable history of this extremely vocal and visible catalyst of the Chicano Movement. The book will add significantly to our understanding of Sixties protest movements and the social and political conditions that gave them birth.

Corina Raquel Zavala. Crystal City women’s reflections and stories of the Chicano movement in Crystal City, Texas. Dissertation (UT-Austin 2014). Search library for access.

Crystal City, Texas has been a part of the Chicano Movement narrative since the beginning. Crystal City High School like others across the United States held walkouts to protest the lack of respect for the Mexican American culture and for civil rights for Mexican Americans in schools. Crystal City is also the home to one of the original Raza Unida Parties. This rich history has placed Crystal City in a unique position in Chicano history. This study draws from Chicana Feminist epistemology, methodology, and scholarship to disrupt the meta-narrative that is and has been told of the Chicano Movement, and more specifically about Crystal City and its part in the Movement. By creating a counter narrative that is woman centered, this dissertation seeks to disrupt the binary of good/bad views of the Chicano Movement. This is done through the use of oral histories and testimonios of four women who were not directly in the spotlight of the Chicano Movement. This dissertation then briefly examines what stories our four women shared with their youngest child. This was done to investigate what the author has experienced with younger generations of Cristaleños. The experiences can best be described as disillusionment of the Chicano Movement. The major components of this dissertation are the stories the four participants share about the Chicano Movement in Crystal City, Texas. These stories are personal and touching in a way that showcases the use of Chicana Feminist methodology and disrupts the meta-narrative of the Chicano Movement and the binary of the views of the Movement.

Armando Navarro. The Cristal Experiment : A Chicano Struggle for Community Control. University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Search library for electronic version.

Amidst the turbulence and militancy of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Mexicano population of the dusty agricultural town of Crystal City, Texas (Cristal in Spanish), staged two electoral revolts, each time winning control of the city council and school board. The landmark city council victory in 1963 was a first for Mexican Americans in South Texas, and Cristal—the “spinach capital of the world”—became for a time the political capital of the Chicano Movement. In The Cristal Experiment, Armando Navarro presents the most comprehensive examination to date of the rise of the Chicano political movement in Cristal, its successes and conflicts (both internal and external), and its eventual decline. He looks particularly at the larger and more successful “Second Revolt” in 1970 and its aftermath up to 1981, examining the political, economic, educational, and social changes for Mexicanos that resulted. Drawing upon nearly 100 interviews, a wealth of secondary materials, and his own experiences as a political organizer in the Chicano Movement, Navarro offers a shrewd and insightful analysis not only of the events in Cristal, but also of the workings of local politics generally, the politics of community control, and the factors inherent in the American political system that lead to the self-destruction of political movements. As both a political scientist and an organizer, he outlines important lessons to be learned from what happened in Cristal and to the Chicano Movement.

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Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales

I Am Joaquin / Yo soy Joaquin. Translated by Juanita Dominguez. (1967)

https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/latinos/joaquin.htm

Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. (1969)

http://latinopia.com/latino-history/plan-de-aztlan/

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Focus on Austin

Austin Revealed: Chicano Civil Rights

Austin PBS collection of short videos

https://klru.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/austin-revealed-chicano-civil-rights/

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