Brown Is Beautiful

Law & Society Review, Mar 2005 by Romero, Mary

Drawing primarily from Chicano Movement writings in community and student newspapers, books, and pamphlets, López chronicles the increasing cultural nationalism and racialized identity in the Chicano Movement. Interrogating the use of the term la raza in the movement, López notes the changing emphasis from the notion of peoplehood to the biological notion of race. Movement literature increasingly addressed discrimination explicitly as racism. López devotes an entire chapter to the increasing racialization and radicalization of the Brown Berets as depicted in their newspaper, La Causa (p. 191). He further explores the impact that Chicano as a racialized term had upon other communities and organizations among Mexican Americans, noting both the reluctance of the G.I. Forum to identify racially and the embracing reception from the La Raza Unida party (p. 209).

In addition, links between Chicanos and Meso-America, particularly the Aztecs, was as much a claim about race as it was about culture. With the mythical land Aztlán as a rallying cry for the movement, Chicano ideology espoused cultural nationalism along-side an increasingly racialized emphasis on mestizo identity. Chicano identity embracing carnalismo (brotherhood) privileged males alongside patriarchal notions of family, gender, and sexuality. Consistent with feminist critiques of Chicano ideology, López identifies the nationalistic and masculine racial identity politics in the Chicano Movement. Early writings of the Chicano Movement mythologized Chicanos as descendants of Aztecs and claimed the Southwest as Aztlán, thereby essentializing a notion of culture and the mestizo that was later amplified in poetry, art, literature, and dance. Inventing Chicanos as indigenous descendants of pre-contact Indian civilizations is found in the early writings of the movement, including Armando Rendón's Chicano Manifesto (1971), Corky Gonzales' epic poem "Yo Soy Joaquin" (1972), and Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino (1971).

López's epilogue summarizes the legacy of the Chicano Movement on Mexican American identity as condemning racist stereotypes, changing Chicanos' political position, and making major strides in education at the college level. Acosta's demonstration of discrimination in grand jury selections created a public forum exposing how Mexican Americans suffered unequal treatment in the legal system. The struggle in the courtroom included Acosta's attempts to establish that Mexicans constituted a separate class. Acosta's defense exposed the difficulties of proving the existence of a socially, but not legally, recognized racial identity. He drew attention to daily interactions in schools, banks, and workplaces that established and maintained racial categories and fall outside the rigidly constructed legal black/white binary racial paradigm. While Acosta was unable to successfully argue discrimination, his questioning of judges exposed the internal workings of structural racism that reproduced political exclusion and institutionalized racism without racists. The East L.A. Thirteen and Biltmore Six cases set the scene for a later grand jury investigation into the killing of Los Angeles Times reporter Rubén Salazar. And most fitting indeed is López's epigraph from one of Salazar's last Los Angeles Times articles: "Justice is the most important word in race relations" (p. xii; Salazar 1970: part 2 at 7).