The Chicano Movement (1960s Civil Rights)

Chicano Movement Protests 

       
          Though we most often hear about African Americans’ civil rights, we often overlook the fact that the Civil Rights Movement was fighting for civil rights for all Americans of color. In particular, the Chicano Movement was a subsect of the civil rights movement that aimed to achieve three goals for Hispanic Americans: restoration of their land, rights for farmers, and creating reforms for their education.

          As context to this movement, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, making the Mexicans that lived in the territory that the U.S. gained automatic American citizens. These new Mexican-Americans assumed that they would be given full civil rights and treated with respect, but, ultimately, were not.

       The earliest and some of the most integral events in the Chicano Movement were Supreme Court cases. In 1947, the Supreme Court case Mendez v. Westminster that ruled that Latino children could not be segregated from white children in schools. Similarly, in 1954, the Supreme Court case Hernandez v. Texas ruled that all racial groups must have equal protection under the law, not just African Americans and whites.

California Grape Boycott

          Strikes and demonstrations complemented the numerous legal challenges Hispanics made in court, showing their dedicated activism. In the 1960s, to achieve the right to unionization for farmworkers, a national boycott on grapes was organized, where grape pickers went on strike and Americans refused to buy grapes. Eventually, in 1970, the UFW, or United Farm Workers, was acknowledged as a union. Some students staged school walkouts in the late 1960s to protest issues in the American education system, such as Eurocentric curriculums and a ban on speaking Spanish in school. Consequently, Congress passed eventually passed the Equal Opportunity Act in 1974 that created more bilingual programs in public schools.

          Through their actions, inspired by the demonstrations African Americans created, Hispanics were able to achieve more civil rights throughout the 1960s and 1970s. 

1968 Los Angeles school walkout

Sources

https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197398/

https://www.thoughtco.com/chicano-movement-brown-and-proud-2834583 

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

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Coachella/chicano.html