THE GENTLE REVOLUTIONARIES

Carolyn Hileman - The Voice* | May 2, 2008

Last October a group of Mexican-Americans invaded and occupied the august chambers of the Los Angeles City Board of Education. Those six days and six nights of sit-in and sleep-in were a shock for the board, and even more shocking for citizens of the city of Los Angles. Something mysterious had bitten the complacent Mexicans of the city’s East Side.

On the face of it, this invasion of the highest level of Los Angeles educational bureaucracy was an angry protest. The protesters hoped to force the board to hear substantive complaints about the quality of Mexican education. There was also the matter of the reinstatement of Teacher Sal Castro was prosecuted with 12 others for allegedly conspiring to lead student walkouts at four East Side high schools last March. He also was removed as a teacher at Lincoln High, then reinstated after the recent protests and demonstrations. Sal Castro, a Lincoln High School social science teacher accused of leading school walk-outs the previous spring. But the real event, the significance of which was not lost on the board, the city, or the Mexican-American community, was the first important public appearance of something called Brown Power.

Who were the protesters? What is Brown Power? What is the meaning of this sudden uproar among the presumably passive 650,000 Mexicans living in the Los Angeles County?

The protesters at the Board of Education were, to say the least, a very mixed company. There was least one Catholic Priest, one Epicopalian priest and several Protestant ministers. There were Mexican-American college students from UCLA and from California State College, Los Angeles. Most were indeed, Mexican-Americans and very few were more than 30 years of age. Some wore beards and brown berets; others, college clothing and neat business suits. There were some who looked like recent arrivals from the mountains of Guatemala. This guerrilla-like appearance had been cultivated carefully because these few were the Brown Berets, the official representatives of Brown Power.

The trouble at the moment-and the most important single fact about Brown Power-is that none of the October protestors can agree on exactly what Brown Power is, or on what it ought to be. Paradoxically, Brown Power is almost sure to become whatever the larger American community decides it ought to be.

For some of the young militants, Brown Power is a sort of life-condition shared by all Mexican-Americans. It is a feeling, a mystical sort of thing created by being Mexican in a sea of Anglos. It is being a member of la raza (meaning “our race” or “our people”). Young Mexicans (it isn’t likely to happen to older Mexicans) receive Brown Power by the right of birth. Its primary sign is a brown skin. “Our skin is brown. Brown is a beautiful color.” Brown Power militants generally share an intense attachment to “Mexican culture”-the whole complex of family feeling, food, music, and social mannerism that they accept as “Mexican.” It is also the accumulated history of the Mexicans in the United States-of anger and clotted rage at poor education, poor jobs, and the grinding misery of thousands of Southwestern barrios (ghettos).

But the most important part of Brown Power is a kind of cocky aggressiveness-an angry mustache and an insolent guerrillero beard that carries a special message for the “racist” white Angle-Saxon Protestant. The Brown Power Mexican is telling the Anglo that things have changed. The Mexican rural laborer faded away a generation ago. His son moved to the city. He’s young, tough, smart, and he’s “watching you, white man.” He’s not patient, he’s not submissive. He’s not Tio Taco who wants to please his Angle patron.