De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century - Review

Progressive, The, March, 1999 by Demetria Martinez

De Colores Means All of Us:Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century by Elizabeth Martinez South End Press. 254 pages. $18.00 paper.

Latinos will soon exceed African Americans as the largest minority in the United States. But we are not only invisible in the mainstream media; we're pushed to the side in progressive publications and causes.

I'm hopeful, however, that minds might open with the publication of Elizabeth Martinez's marvelous collection of essays, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century.

Martinez--a veteran of the Chicano and women's movements and a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)--examines the consequences of a strictly black-white analysis of racism.

Her straight talk, sharp humor, and formidable historical sensibilities are the lifeblood of this book, which includes a foreword by Angela Davis.

Whether writing on environmental racism, Latina liberation, or immigrant-bashing in "For Whom the Taco Bell Tolls," Martinez makes it clear that the future for progressives lies in forging coalitions across colors and causes, and that feminism and gay rights must be central to all racial justice movements.

In "Seeing More Than Black and White," Martinez cites a 1996 Census report: In fifty years, more than a third of U.S. residents will, in fact, be neither black nor white. We will fall into categories including Asian/Pacific Island American, Latino, Native American/Indigenous, and Arab American.

Such a shift demands "fresh and fearless thinking about racism," writes Martinez.

She offers to do some of her own fearless thinking. She examines the roots of today's simplified vision of race. Whites have always depended upon blackness to define their superiority, she writes. Historically, nonblacks posed less of a threat to Anglo ideas of "racial purity," so Anglos see other "races" as white, she explains.

Then there is the problem of historical amnesia. Moments that mar this nation's glorified "origin myths" go unexamined, such as lynchings of Chicanos in the Southwest, she says.

The result: Americans don't know much about their own country. "People who learn at least a little about black slavery remain totally ignorant about how the United States seized half of Mexico or how it has colonized Puerto Rico," she writes.

It is no wonder, then, that the first stages of Clinton's "dialogue on race" in 1997 excluded Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.

Such a narrow vision of race is not helped by the fact that many white progressives insist on placing themselves at the center of "the sixties." In "That Old White (Male) Magic," Martinez scrutinizes two dozen books purporting to deal with that era, including Todd Gitlin's The Sixties and James Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets.

She cites one example after another of mass organizing and protest by Latinos and other groups that the two dozen chroniclers managed to overlook in their fixation on white, male-led activism.

"Three books devote from one paragraph to a page to the Chicano/a movement," Martinez writes. "The rest are totally silent."

Only one book mentions the death of three Chicanos resulting from police action at the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War; the August 29, 1970, demonstration in Los Angeles drew 20,000 people and ended in a cloud of tear gas.

Martinez also takes the authors to task for their analysis of black resistance, which she says gets short shrift. She notes that the books do acknowledge the massiveness and exceptional leadership of black protest.

"You will look long and hard, however, for the concept of that movement as central or seminal, as a catalyst of the 1960s in general," writes Martinez. "It is seen as germane only to the problems facing African-Americans--a `special interest' group ... and not as a challenge to the totality of U.S. society."

Martinez also documents a new wave of--mostly unreported--activism among Latino youth.

"Progressives have no business falling prey to the dominant society's common view that the problem of racism is minorities feeling dissatisfied, rather than a lethal poison in the spirit and the body of our entire culture,", she concludes. "The cure is a whole new world that only a sense of our global linkage, of interdependence, can breathe into life."

Demetria Martinez is a poet and novelist based in Tucson, Arizona. She is a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter.