Читать книгу To Sin Against Hope - Alfredo Gutierrez - Страница 6

CHAPTER 3

War and Chicanos

At seventeen I thought it natural to hitchhike the six miles to Globe, Arizona, walk into the recruiter’s storefront, and enlist in the military. There were no thoughtful conversations at the kitchen table with my mother and father asking me to carefully think it through, nor was anyone in my family dismayed. It was, I guess in retrospect, what was expected of me. My father had been exiled for most of World War II; his brother José enlisted almost immediately upon his return from Mexico; the oldest of my two brothers, Gilberto, enlisted when he turned seventeen, became a Ranger, and took part in both combat paratrooper jumps in the Korean conflict; my brother Arnoldo enlisted when he graduated from high school and spent the next twenty years on active military duty—so I guess that ride to Globe was destined. There was perhaps one more reason that my enlistment would elicit so little discussion in the family. By 1963 there was only one whorehouse left in the town, the Keystone, but business was so bad or the moral opprobrium so great that it was only open on Friday and Saturday nights. The rest of the week it just sat there at the bottom of Davis Canyon, empty, intriguing, and inviting. The stories of the painted ladies, their exotic toys, and the luxuries that surrounded them was the stuff that drove adolescents into a frenzy. One night the temptation overcame us ruffians. We broke in through a bathroom window, three of us, spent an hour or so upending the place and were disappointed by a drab cheap hotel with rooms the size of cells, steel frame beds and mattresses that stank of urine and disinfectant. There was a box of whiskey, gin, and rum in the kitchen. We stole it and lugged it up the canyon to Cabezón’s house. The police came to my house and picked me up the following morning. It turns out that Cabezón had been unhappy with our paltry loot, and after the Bear and I left, he decided to go back to the Keystone, this time with a diablito, a hand truck, and his little brother. They somehow loaded up the oversize refrigerator on the hand truck and proceeded to push it down an alley and up the canyon. Cabezón was a short little fellow with an inordinately large head, hence the nickname. He must have been quite a sight pushing a refrigerator twice his height up the road. It was not long before the police took them away, and it was apparently not long after that before Cabezón gave me and the Bear up. Cabezón got probation. The Bear and I went before the superior court judge in Globe, and, given our past colorful history with Judge McGhee, he gave us an ultimatum: either the military or six months at the notorious juvenile detention center known as Fort Grant. For me it was a godsend. I intended to sign up for the Marines as soon as I was out of high school. The Bear adamantly rejected the deal, Man you’re gonna be gone a long time, they could shoot you or cut your legs off and stick you in a wheelchair, ¿estás loco o qué? Me, I’m gonna be back in six months and I’m gonna kill pinche Cabezón.” Thus began the Bear’s long life of crime and incarceration. Fortunately he never got around to killing Cabezón.

The family has plenty of heroes, but my time in the Army was free of courageous charges, spectacular parachute jumps, extraordinary sacrifice, or even a glimpse of combat. When I got to Globe, the Marine recruiter was at lunch, so I ended up in the Army Infantry. A childhood of hunting rabbits and wild javelina pigs made shooting a big, round, slow-moving target at a hundred yards a cinch, so they declared me a sharpshooter. I was apparently smart enough to easily pass their battery of tests, so they made me a Mental Hygienist. Mental Hygiene was the Army’s euphemistic way of describing a small independent unit whose responsibility was to remove primarily combat command officers from the front who had, in the eyes of their superiors, gone stark raving mad and were threatening the wellbeing of the troops. I guess I wasn’t that smart because it took me some time and some straight talk to understand what a unit like that needed with a sharpshooter. Thankfully, I never shot a lunatic officer, though I did meet a number of candidates.

And upon the end of my term I respectfully declined reenlistment. The war gave me a heightened understanding that the work of killing and death was not my work. In time I would conclude it should be nobody’s work.

War and the role of Latinos in America’s wars was to become one of the major themes of the Chicano Movement. Vietnam would divide America. It would rip through the Latino community as well, but there it would also call into question what was increasingly seen as the embarrassing pandering of the Americanizers and its deadly consequences.

Wherever Latino veterans gather there will inevitably be a conversation about our proud presence in every conflict since the Revolutionary War. David Hayes-Bautista’s El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition details the Californios who proudly volunteered and valiantly fought with the Union Army.¹ Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juárez were the two most admired figures to the Californio community. Latinos volunteered proudly for World War II and the Korean War from every city and town in the southwest. After I was discharged, it was easy to find the “Mexican” VFW or American Legion post in almost every community, large or small, that I would find myself in. The battlefront may have been integrated, but the veteran organizations, their rituals, and the drinking that went along with them never were. Vietnam was different, and so were the Chicano veterans. Rather than be the occasion for proud nostalgic storytelling, and, in many cases, liquored-up fantastical tales of heroism and suffering (my post had an informal rule that after ten p.m. or five beers, drunken exaggerations were forgiven), Vietnam provoked heated debate. I believe a large percentage of Chicano Vietnam vets soon withdrew from the posts, because any expression of doubt about the war’s justice would provoke outbursts from older vets. Questioning whether Latinos were being killed at an inordinately high rate could ignite angry charges of cowardice and questionable patriotism. It had been the unchallenged dogma of that generation that Latinos volunteered for war, volunteered for the most dangerous units, and fought hard. If you were killed in combat, so be it. That was the price of courage.

And the price was high. In October of 1969 the Congressional Record published a study, Mexican-American Casualties in Vietnam, by Ralph Guzman. The analysis found that:

Mexican-American military personnel have a higher death rate in Vietnam than all other servicemen. Analysis of casualty reports for two periods of time: one between January 1961 and February 1967 and the other between December 1967 and March 1969 reveals that a disproportionate number of young men with distinctive Spanish names do not return from the Southeast Asia theater of war. Investigation also reveals that a substantial number of them are involved in high-risk branches of the service … It is significant that the percentages of Spanish surnamed casualties for each period remains nearly constant at 19.0 percent.²

According to the 1960 US Census, only 11.8 percent of the total southwestern population had distinctive Spanish surnames. Guzman speculates that over-representation in death may be due to the fact that few Mexican Americans were in college, and thus they were unable to receive deferments available to others, or it may be due to factors “that motivate Mexican Americans to join the Armed Forces, [of which] some may be rooted in the inherited culture of these people.” He goes on to say that “still others wish to prove their Americanism. Organizations like the American GI Forum, composed of ex-GIs of Mexican-American identity, have long proclaimed the sizable military contributions of the Mexican-American soldier. According to the American GI Forum and other Mexican-American groups, members of this minority have an impressive record of heroism in time of war. There is a concomitant number of casualties attending this Mexican American patriotic investment.”³

Among Chicano activists, the study would be quoted as if it were Biblical verse in a gathering of evangelical zealots. “One in five” of those killed in Vietnam were Chicanos, was the rallying cry of the Chicano Moratorium against the war. “One in five” was the proud assertion offered at American Legion Post 41, and presumably at every other Mexican post and at every meeting of LULAC and the GI Forum, to prove that we were indeed courageous, patriotic Americans willing to sacrifice our young in defense of this country. Defending, even praising the disproportionate killing of Mexican-American soldiers was probably an untenable position to take from the beginning. Ultimately, the Vietnam experience and the activism of the Chicano Movement would end the rhetoric of being white and of delivering oneself to Americanism at the expense of one’s Latino identity. It would also besmirch the argument that you demonstrated your patriotism by sending your children to war, knowing there existed a statistically higher chance that they would be killed.

A passionate redefinition of being Mexican-American, and a wave of radical activism that seemed like a necessary rite of passage, took hold in college campuses across the southwest in the mid-1960s. The Chicano Movement, as the decentralized, often angry, amorphous movement came to be known, was the product of a long, slow boil. The kids were pissed, and they were primarily pissed at the established Mexican-American leadership.

The principal organizations that constituted the Mexican-American leadership in the post–World War II era were LULAC and the GI Forum. The activists of the Chicano Movement were raised in a social and political environment that those two organizations helped create. The Chicano generation was the beneficiary of their accomplishments and the inheritor of their legacy, such as it was. LULAC was founded in 1929 in the very heart of discrimination, Corpus Christi, Texas. Membership was limited to American citizens. It has a remarkable record of accomplishment. LULAC was organizing boycotts and sit-ins in the 1930s to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations; it was responsible for the first major legal challenge against segregated “Mexican” schools, Salvatierra v. Del Rio Independent School District in 1931; in 1945 it successfully challenged the segregated schools of Orange County, California; it filed fifteen challenges in Texas that finally ended school segregation there; and in 1946 it filed Mendez v. Westminster, which ended 100 years of segregated schools in California. It was the Mendez case that would serve as the key precedent to the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal segregation in the rest of the country. LULAC marched, protested, filed lawsuits, and advocated for the rights of Latinos throughout its history. So how does such a defender of human rights become a major tormentor of the undocumented and the chief proselytizer of being white in America?

The Mexican-American obsession with being white probably begins with the bungled negotiation that produced the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Mexicans in the conquered territories were guaranteed the enjoyment of all rights of citizens. The problem of course was that in the United States only white persons could enjoy all of the rights of citizens. The first major test of the whiteness of Mexicans occurred in California twenty years after it became part of the United States. The citizenship of a wealthy Californio and one of the state’s major land barons, Pablo de la Guerra, was challenged in 1870 when he was called to sit on a jury. De la Guerra, whose family arrived in Santa Barbara before the British colonies declared their independence, had served in California’s first Constitutional Convention. Stripped of his citizenship, he became ineligible to own land, vote, hold office, or even sue his accusers. De la Guerra was clearly not white, and possibly even “three-fourths Indian.”⁴ He was said to be the victim of “caste creep,” wherein Indians and mulattos tarnish the purity of white blood.⁵ Fortunately, de la Guerra had the resources to hire attorneys and fight back. Ultimately, the court decided that he was “white enough” and restored his citizenship, but it also set a dangerous precedent: the court appropriated for itself the right to determine racial composition and exclude from citizenship any Mexican who was not “white enough.”⁶

In 1897 a federal district court in San Antonio took an entirely different tack. Ricardo Rodriguez, who was applying for citizenship, was carefully targeted by nativists who were seeking to create a legal precedent stating that all non-white Mexicans were ineligible. Rodriguez was a “copper-colored or red-skinned man with dark eyes, straight black hair and high cheekbones.” He would also testify that he was neither of the “original Aztec race nor the Spanish race,” but was a “pure-blooded Mexican.” Rodriguez was not trifling with the question of race, and neither was the judge. Judge T. S. Maxey found that Rodriguez had a right to citizenship based on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and subsequent international agreements. Period. Judge Maxey did not consider the question of Rodriguez’s red skin, the placement of his cheekbones, or his racial composition as relevant.⁷

Unfortunately, the Rodriguez case did not settle the matter. The state constitution of California adopted in 1849 gave the right of citizenship only to white Mexicans. Mestizos, Indians, and blacks were excluded.⁸ The 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas gave citizenship to Mexicans who were not Indian or black, and the territorial constitution of Arizona limited citizenship to white males and white Mexican males.⁹ Courts and state commissions and laws would continue to try to exclude anyone who was discernibly mestizo. The delicate legal status of Mexican Americans augured toward protecting one’s legal whiteness. In 1930 the United States Congress considered a bill imposing quotas on Mexican migration. For the first time in history, Mexican Americans appeared in Congress to testify, mostly in support of the legislation. The testimony in part was that LULAC, then barely a year old, was dedicated to developing “within the members of our race the best and purest and most perfect type of true and loyal citizen of the United States of America.” ¹⁰

That same year, as the anti-immigrant campaign was nearing its peak, the US Census announced that it was reclassifying “Mexicans” from the white category to a new “Mexican” category. The census would now enumerate race as: a. White, b. Negro, c. Mexican. Predictably, LULAC mounted a concerted effort to overturn that decision. In 1936 the city of El Paso announced that Mexicans would henceforth be categorized as colored. LULAC organized a successful campaign to reverse El Paso’s decision and, prompted by that victory, filed a court challenge to the US Census classification of Mexicans as, well, Mexicans.¹¹

LULAC took up the objective of being white as a civil rights strategy. Being anything other than white placed the whole community in a legally precarious position. Unfortunately, in time being white became a single-minded strategy for destroying Mexican identity. Since its foundation, the “LULAC Code” had urged: “Be proud of your origin … respect your glorious past and help defend the rights of your people … learn how to master with purity the most essential languages—English and Spanish.” But historian David Gutiérrez tells us that in the early 1950s those provisions were stricken from the code. In fact, in LULAC’s “Aims and Purposes” published in 1954, all references to the Spanish language completely disappeared, replaced by a pledge to “foster the acquisition and facile use of the official language of our country that we may thereby equip ourselves and our families for the fullest enjoyment of our rights and privileges and the efficient discharge of our duties to this, our country.”¹²

At its ugliest, during the 1950s, LULAC’s obsession with being white was the handmaiden to the practices of humiliating children who spoke Spanish, of punishing anyone appearing too Mexican, and of supporting blatant discrimination against the recently arrived because they replenished the mexicanidad of the community. In time LULAC’s obsession appeared to the students of the Chicano Movement as self-loathing. Eventually, however, the abuses of the Bracero Program, the blatant racism in the execution of Operation Wetback, the troubling casualty rates in Vietnam, and finally the confrontation with the Chicano Movement caused LULAC to reconsider their fifty-year longing to be just like the Anglos … maybe even to be them.

In the 1950s, the American GI Forum was in the news even more than LULAC. I suspect that just about every Mexican American heard the story of Private Felix Longoria. He was killed by a sniper in the Philippines, his body was returned to his family in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, and the local Funeral Home owner refused to bury him, because “the whites won’t like it,” he reportedly told Longoria’s widow.¹³ The American GI Forum, founded only months earlier, immediately launched a protest and also formally asked Senator Lyndon Johnson to intervene. In the midst of the controversy, Mrs. Longoria and her children were refused lunch at the local diner, because they were Mexican. The case of Private Longoria became a national scandal, and the president of the GI Forum, Dr. Hector P. García—a charismatic, brilliant, articulate voice on behalf of Mexican-American veterans—quickly became the most recognizable Mexican-American civil rights leader of the decade. As a result of the Forum’s efforts, Pvt. Longoria became the first Mexican-American soldier buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

García articulated the plight of the Mexican American unlike anyone before him. He commanded media attention like no Mexican-American civil rights leader ever had. Forum members paraded at every opportunity and surrounded Dr. (former Major) García each time he spoke. In the 1950s the guys had yet to grow a paunch, they still wore their uniforms handsomely and executed parade orders crisply. García and the Forum loved the press, and the press loved them back. Unfortunately, García and the Forum suffered from the same schizophrenia as their counterparts at LULAC. García railed against the “wetback tide” and lobbied against illegal immigration. In 1954, the Forum published a propaganda booklet still ballyhooed by nativists: “What Price Wetbacks?” “Illegal immigration represents the fundamental problem facing the Spanish-speaking population of the southwest,” it read. It argued that poverty, sickness, and low educational achievement was a consequence of those Mexicans crossing without papers, but then went further than the other Mexican organizations. The Forum offered policy solutions that read as though they were manufactured in Bush or Obama’s Department of Homeland Security fifty years later: “enforceable penalties for harboring or aiding an alien … confiscation of vehicles used to transport aliens and … enforceable penalties for the employment of illegal aliens.”¹⁴ The Forum was composed of veterans of America’s wars; all were required to be citizens, and reeked of patriotism. This made them particularly credible when, in the midst of the Cold War and the Red Scare, they raised without a scintilla of evidence the specter of communist infiltration among their reasons to oppose the “wetback tide.”¹⁵ Until now, wetbacks had been merely filthy, disease-ridden, ignorant, and lazy—but after the Forum’s attack they were potentially a terrorist threat as well.

So imagine you are a kid in the 1950s, and what seems an unstoppable onslaught of messages from every front is telling you that you have to be like them, not like you, and even your own family is telling you that for your own good you have to be Alfred, not Alfredo, and that Alfred should be careful where he speaks Spanish and to whom and never ever even hint that his family had been deported and to proclaim loudly albeit untruthfully that everyone in the family including the dog was made in America. Even a kid wonders why the leaders of the Mexican-American community mostly attack Mexicans, even though they are careful to point out they only attack the wetback kind. In the 1940s and ’50s the border was not yet a war zone. Folks went back and forth with relative ease, the neighbors may have arrived without papers and stayed, heck, half the town may have arrived without papers. As a little kid I used to ask my father what a wetback was, and he would explain that the origin of the word referred to crossing the Rio Grande with no papers, but now it meant all Mexicans without papers. Mexicans without papers were wetbacks. I think that made sense when I was five or six. By the time I was twelve or so I began to wonder whether this Dr. García guy had his head screwed on right. And perhaps only years afterwards did I grasp that these so-called leaders of the Mexican-American community had, for doubtless the most selfless of reasons, adopted the rhetoric of the nativists in order to achieve ends opposed by the nativists. They were cowed, I thought, by the seeming power and popularity of hate, so they hoped to sound just like the racists in order to demonstrate that they and presumably the cleaned-up, round-sounding English-speaking Americans of Mexican descent whom they claimed to speak for weren’t really like those dirty Mexicans the racists hated. The logic was as convoluted as my attempt to explain it. The tactic was foolish, and ultimately discredited. Unfortunately, in the century to come, mainstream Washington-based Latino and immigrant rights groups would adopt the shameful tactic and suffer the same fate.

In the tough mining town of Miami, the anti-immigrant hysteria played out with a difference. In much of the southwest, perhaps the only voices Latinos heard speaking out on their behalf were those of the compromised, often servile LULAC and GI Forum. In Miami and in a few other places across the country there were alternative voices. Their message, because it was diametrically opposed to the prevailing dirge, was all the more startling. And to young Mexican Americans, uncomfortable with the constant pressure to conform, it would have sounded all the more intriguing and exciting. In Miami, it was the Union.

By 1950 the Miami Copper Company had opened a new open pit mine in the Sleeping Beauty mountain ridge, about twenty miles from the town. The company had reached a sweetheart deal with United Steelworkers to be the lead union and for the first time to accept Mexican members, my father among them. The company was responding to intense pressure to break the Mine Mill union, because of its “subservience to the Communist Party.” Time magazine, in the 1950s perhaps the most powerful single publication, described how the Mine Mill was tossed out of the CIO:

The C.I.O. was cleaning out one more Red-infested corner of its labor empire. This time the man in the corner was 39-year-old Maurice Travis, boss of the militant Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers … “Only the Communist assumption that what is good for the Soviet Union is good for American labor could justify Mine-Mill’s position. Only constant subservience to the Communist Party can explain it.” Mine-Mill, said Potofsky [the CIO official who presented the indictment against the Mine Mill], was dominated and its policies set by a four-member steering committee, which took its orders from … the hierarchy of the Communist Party. The Reds ran the union newspaper, its organizing staff and its leadership … Travis denied the charges, declared that the hearing was a “kangaroo court.” But C.I.O. President Philip Murray gave him short shrift. He threw Mine-Mill out of the C.I.O.¹⁶

Red-infested or not, the Mine Mill remained for another fifteen years the voice of the Mexican community in the mining strip of Arizona and eastern New Mexico. The leadership of Local 586 in Miami, Roberto Barcon, Kikes Pastor (father of future Congressman Ed Pastor), Elias Lazarin, and the regional organizer Maclovio Barraza, were treated with deference in the town. Barcon and Barraza were both named communists by a Congressional committee, which led to the often-whispered wisdom, “If Barcon and Barraza are communists, then communists must be some pretty good people.” The Union responded to every act of discrimination in the town. In time the schools were integrated, the Y’s Christian pool became open to Mexicans every day of the week, and the Irish priest deigned to give Mexicans communion from the same silver service as he did the white folk. The Union maintained its fierce opposition to the dual pay system in any form and challenged the Company on discriminatory promotion practices. The skilled crafts––electricians, carpenters, welders––always a bastion of white workers as long any old-timer could remember, opened to its first Mexican members. Arnold Rojas, a lifelong Union member, became the first Latino electrician at Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company, and my father the first at Miami Copper Company’s Sleeping Beauty Mine.

Mine Mill was instrumental in forming a progressive Mexican-American national organization that would unabashedly fight for the rights of Mexican workers and families, be they documented, undocumented, or braceros. The Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA) formed in response to angry Union members who were beaten and abused by the sheriff of Grants, in New Mexico. A legal defense was mounted on their behalf, a successful political campaign to defeat the sheriff was organized. In the aftermath the Union came to the realization that a national organization to aggressively defend the rights of Mexican-American working people was needed.¹⁷ The initial membership was drawn from the members of Mine Mill and from the progressive unions that had also been forced out of the CIO by anti-communist hysteria. ANMA grew quickly. Within four years there were local branches in almost every Western community in which progressive labor had a presence: Los Angeles, San Francisco, El Paso, Phoenix, Denver, Tucson, Albuquerque, and of course every mining community in the southwest. One of ANMA’s significant organizers was a very young former president of the Longshoremen’s local in San Francisco, the future founder of the Mexican American Political Association and soon to become one of the most important political and community leaders of the Latino community: Bert Corona.

ANMA aggressively fought discrimination on every front and—unlike LULAC, the Forum, and even the predecessor to Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, the National Agriculture Workers Union—organized braceros to fight the wanton abuse to which they were often subjected.¹⁸

Mine Mill and ANMA were both important players in the making of perhaps the most significant and realistic film of Mexican life in mining towns, depicting for the first time the powerful role of women in Mexican life: Salt of the Earth. On the morning of October 15, 1950, the miners at the underground Empire Zinc mine in Hanover, New Mexico, mounted a picket line at the gates. Mine Mill had demanded an end to the dual wage system, wherein Mexican workers were paid less than their white counterparts for doing the same job, and for their wages to be raised to the industry standard. The company refused. The strike began when the workers surfaced from below. The strike was not unlike any other in the parched hills of the mining strip that ran from northern Mexico, through Arizona, and into western New Mexico. Strikes were a tough drama that dominated the region while they lasted, but the mining towns’ isolation meant that they rarely received much notice in the major cities. What transformed the Empire Zinc strike was the company’s decision that it would reopen with non-union labor. In preparation for what they perceived as their ultimate defeat of Mine Mill, the Company asked for an injunction against further picketing by the Union. On June 12, 1951, a federal judge dutifully granted it.¹⁹

The Union’s meeting that evening was contentious and angry. It was doubtful that future action would be possible. Defeat seemed imminent. But the gloom lifted when the wife of one of the workers pointed out that the injunction was against striking miners. The wives were not miners, “so they could picket and the Sheriff would have no authority to stop them.” Macho Mexican men first scoffed at the notion, but when they realized the women were serious, mockery gave way to stunned disbelief, followed by vociferous objections. The meeting lasted for hours. “We had a hard time convincing the men but we finally did, by a vote,” Braulia Velázquez, an outspoken wife, would comment later. An unusual provision in the Mine Mill’s bylaws made the difference. Local 890’s auxiliary members, the miner’s wives, were allowed a vote, and they voted overwhelmingly to take over the picket line. The women were at the company’s gates at sunrise. They would stay there until the end of the strike. ²⁰

The sheriff and the company representatives stared at the women in the picket line, uncertain how to respond. A few days later they regained their composure, wrangled an arrest order from the local county attorney and sent the sheriff’s deputies to arrest the picketers, who were all women, many with children. The deputies threw gas grenades into the crowd of women, then charged at them. There was bitter resistance; according to the deputies, “we keep arresting them but they keep moving in …” Fifty-three women were ultimately arrested and jailed, where they proceeded “to raise hell the entire day. The deputies jailed the children as well as the women and the conditions were intolerable. According to the Sheriff they made the ‘worst mess.’ He released all 53 along with their children that evening. The following morning they were at the picket line as a national scandal erupted.”²¹

Rosie the Riveter did what she was told on behalf of the United States of America, always depicted as a smiling, red-cheeked, young white woman beloved by everyone. Esperanza the Picketer was brown, spoke English with an accent, did not do what the authorities asked, was angry, demanded equality, and acted on behalf of a union that had been declared communist by the red-baiters in Congress. Women like her were not conforming to the preachings of the Americanizers.

ANMA launched a national campaign in support of the strike. By 1951 ANMA had locals throughout the southwest. ANMA adopted Mine Mill’s method of organizing families, as Bert Corona, the northern California lead organizer, explained: “In Oakland for example we had about one hundred and fifty families. In San José, about four hundred families joined ANMA … we built quite a chapter in San Francisco organizing between three hundred and four hundred families. ANMA supported equal pay for equal work for Mexicans, and it supported equal rights for men and women.’’ He recalls, “Several ANMA chapters had strong women leaders. In San José, for example, Dora Sanchez … was the heart and soul of ANMA. The INS tried to deport her husband … In San Francisco key women leaders were Aurora Santana de Dawson, Elvira Romo, and Abigail Alvarez.” ANMA was fiercely proud of its Mexican heritage, it was uncompromising in its support for liberation movements throughout Latin America, and it displayed an internationalist, pan-Latin perspective (the Guatemalan consul in northern California attended meetings to describe how the US government was trying to overthrow the democratically elected administration of President Jacobo Arbenz). It participated in demonstrations supporting the Cuban Liberation movement headed by a then obscure guerrilla leader named Fidel Castro, it opposed nuclear armament and supported the peace movement. ANMA’s reach was impressive, and its support for the strike meant that this industrial action would soon be a cause célèbre in Latino communities across the southwest.²²