Luis Valdez,Free Speech,and El Teatro in the Calendar Round: An Interview with Carlos Muñoz

[The scholar/activist Carlos Muñoz Jr. was a founding editor of Latin American Perspectives. In the political science department at Cal State Los Angeles he was a student of Donald Bray, a fellow founding editor. When he was arrested in 1968 for his leadership in the walkouts of Los Angeles high school students, his lecture notes from Bray’s classes were confiscated. He went on to receive a Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate University and became a leader in the field of ethnic studies, first as the founding chair of the first Chicana/Chicano studies department in the United States at Cal State Los Angeles and then, after teaching comparative culture at the University of California at Irvine, as a member of the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he became chair of the Chicano studies program in the Ethnic Studies Department. His book Youth, Identity, and Power: The Chicano Movement (1989) won the Gustavo Myers Book Award for “outstanding scholarship in the study of human rights in the United States.” He has been the recipient of many awards for his scholarship and activism, including in 2008 being honored as among “Americans Who Tell the Truth.” Recently retired after 44 years in education, he is currently working on several books, including Decolonizing America: The Struggle for a Multiracial Democracy and the autobiography Victory Is in the Struggle.]

At the entrance to the Free Speech Movement Café on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, there is a portrait of Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement of 1964–1965. Tours for prospective students stop there to call attention to the university’s legacy of political activism. A beacon of radicalism in the 1960s in the context of a changing university the Free Speech Movement has reached its fiftieth anniversary. The UC Berkeley faculty members preparing to celebrate that anniversary found ourselves in yet another time of war, deportations, evictions, and police brutality in the lived experience of our students—from the northern frontier of Aztlán to Ayotzinapa, from Murrieta and Ferguson to Oakland—in our region and across our continent. In this context I asked Carlos Muñoz Jr., professor emeritus at Berkeley, to help expose the often-invisible historical record of Chicano activism. We had been working on bringing the acclaimed playwright, producer, and founding director of El Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez, to the campus to launch the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of this renowned company in the performing arts and activism. Given Valdez’s expertise in Mayan and Aztec cultural forms and knowledge, we were reminded that we were approaching the completion of a calendar round in the Mayan calendar, a period of 52 Roman years in which two measures in the Mayan calendar roughly converge to make up what is considered a life cycle, after which sequences of events repeat themselves. With the fiftieth anniversary of the FSM coming at the beginning of this transition, we were inspired to ask what moments the next calendar round would repeat. For a performance scholar working at the intersection of theater and politics in Latin/o America, the moment also seemed propitious to ask Muñoz about his own history of activism and the influence of Luis Valdez on the social movements of which he was a part.

In organizing the Valdez residency, with its readings, lectures, and performances, we asked ourselves how we might help make these conversations not just about the past but also about what this past allows us to envision for our future. On the same night that Luis Valdez presented his keynote talk, “The Power of Zero,” initiating the celebration of 50 years of El Teatro Campesino, students organized a performance that included reading out the names of students who were killed in Ayotzinapa. Within weeks, Ferguson exploded, and police violence once again wracked the country. As each city, small town, and church across this country mourned, we saw new forms of performance and activism emerging in local and networked ways to demand deeper changes. Protests turned the national debate to why race matters in this country and what has yet to be dealt with on a cultural and political level. Thus, in honoring Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino for 50 years of theater production and activism, we hoped to initiate and contribute to larger conversations among artists, activists, and scholars on the Free Speech Movement and the Chicano Power Movement as well.

My interview with Muñoz follows.

Marino:

I wonder if you situate us with regard to your earlier work as an activist and scholar and some of the issues that you and others of that time [the 1960s] were most concerned about?

Muñoz:

First of all, when the Free Speech Movement happened in 1964, I was going to community college, working 40 hours a week and going to school full-time in the evenings. I didn’t have the time to become an activist at that point in my life. But I was being more inspired by the civil rights movement in the South. I kept tabs on what was going on down there and read all of Dr. King’s speeches I could get my hands on. I first became an activist in the anti–Vietnam war movement starting in 1965, when I participated in a protest against the war in Los Angeles. As a veteran, I became eligible for the G.I. Bill, and I was able to stop working full-time and become a full-time student in the daytime. More important, it allowed me the time to become a student activist.

I had become radicalized while serving as a clerk in the intelligence section of the Korean Military Advisory Group in South Korea. I witnessed a coup d’état against that country’s democratic government that resulted in the establishment of a military dictatorship. I wondered why, as a U.S. soldier assigned to defend democracy in that country, I was not ordered to defend that government. Afterward I became aware through intelligence reports of what was going on in Vietnam in terms of sending U.S. “military advisers” to that country that set the stage for the war that followed. It started me thinking critically about U.S. foreign policy. When I was done with my military service, I became an activist and opposed that war.

At that time, not too many Chicano/as were part of the antiwar movement, but there was activism in electoral politics. The 1960 “Viva Kennedy” campaign generated a visible presence of Mexican Americans for the first time. A spinoff was the creation of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) in California, the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations (PASSO) in Texas, and similar organizations throughout the rest of the Southwest. The most dramatic activism emerged in around 1964 in support of the farm workers’ movement led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. By 1967 Chicano/a radical organizations had begun to emerge, beginning with the creation of the Crusade for Justice led by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez. And student activism became visible on college campuses that led to the creation, for example, of United Mexican American Students (UMAS) and the Mexican American Student Confederation (MASC) in California and the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in Texas. I became president of the UMAS chapter at Cal State Los Angeles. In Spring 1968 UMAS, the Brown Berets, and community activists organized the East Los Angeles student walkouts, which were documented in the film series Chicano! We didn’t realize what was going to happen! It was incredible. Ten thousand kids walked out of the barrio high schools. After the walkouts 13 of us were indicted for conspiracy to disrupt the schools. We faced 66 years in prison for the “crime” of conspiring to organize nonviolent student protest. I was put in a cell with guys who were arrested for murder and armed robbery. I wondered, “What am I doing here? I’m a veteran and I’m in prison for organizing nonviolent student protest?”

Marino:

Was there any relationship at that time between the Chicano Power Movement and the Free Speech Movement? Were there people or events that crossed over? Or in some ways did those movements overlap?

Muñoz:

Yes and no. Some Chicano/a student activists had contact with student activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of the Southern civil rights movement. But by the time we organized the Chicano Movement in 1967–1968, the Free Speech Movement was no longer visible. And at that time in 1964 there was practically nothing happening in the Southwest. We were practically invisible on the college campuses. So the connections were limited, but in the context of how the Free Speech Movement emerged as a consequence of the inspiration they got from the Southern civil rights movement, we connect there. There were two Chicanas who were members of the SNCC, Betita Martínez and Maria Varela. The connection was that both the Free Speech Movement and the Chicano Power Movement were inspired by the Southern civil rights movement.

Marino:

In your book you call the Chicano student movement and the larger Chicano Power Movement a quest for new identity and political power. What kind of identity and political power were those movements seeking to achieve, and were they successful?

Muñoz:

I think most of us, including myself, were on the path of assimilation or what I call “colonization.” We were products of a school system that programmed us to buy into the dominant values of those who rule and the myth that we have the most democratic country in the world. As we got involved with issues we became more and more aware of the ideas of Malcolm X. We related to what black students were doing in the framework of black nationalism and black identity. And we began to look at racism more critically, to understand it in historical context—how we became victims of racism in our own experience in contrast to the black experience. Whereas slavery was the key issue for African Americans, the key issue for us was the colonization of our people first by the Spanish Empire after the conquest of Mexico and then by the U.S. Empire after the 1846–1848 war between the United States and Mexico.

The Crusade for Justice hosted a Chicano liberation national conference in 1969, and the majority who attended were student activists. The conference produced a plan of action for the emerging Chicano Power Movement that called for the decolonizing of the Mexican American people. We called it the “Plan de Aztlán.” It called for Chicano/as to reject assimilation and the dominant values of the white ruling class. Whereas blacks were reconnecting with their African roots, we were reconnecting with our indigenous Mexican roots. The Plan called for the creation of our own political and economic alternative institutions.

Marino:

You write about the lack of visibility of Chicana/o activism at that time, and in a sense this is another kind of speech or demand to be heard around free speech and expression. So it’s interesting how you frame this voice that came out of the activism of the 1960s that was ignored by the press and historians and the reproduction of the historical record around the radicalism of the 1960s. Can you describe this part of what might be called the redacted story of the free speech legacy that you’re talking about?

Muñoz:

We started to come up with our own political party to address those issues. It was a force, but it didn’t take root for a lot of different reasons. For example, we had no economic base to fund campaigns, and, like all third parties, we ran up against a two-party dictatorship. But it did open doors to more significant participation of Mexican Americans and other Latino/as in the political system at the local, state, and national levels. The white leadership of the Democratic Party started recruiting Chicana/o movement activists, and so did the Republicans.

Long story short, we now have political representation in the two-party dictatorship, but it doesn’t make any difference, right? Poverty, social injustice, and political powerlessness continue to plague the people. The demand for Chicano self-determination made by the Party and the Chicano Movement as a whole was related to the issue of free speech. Without free speech, the oppression faced by our colonized people could not be put on the national agenda. The Free Speech Movement here at Berkeley was not about that, so it was a different movement altogether.

The Third World Strike was a direct consequence of the Plan de Aztlán. Berkeley Chicana/o student activists who attended the 1968 Denver conference and the 1969 Santa Barbara conference developed their agenda in terms of addressing not only free speech but, more important, academic freedom and demanding the creation of ethnic studies. These were very different from the Free Speech Movement objectives. For example, they demanded a curriculum that addressed the historic experiences of Mexican Americans and other people of color, because up to that point it was still white history. Whereas many books have been published about the Free Speech Movement (the biography of Mario Savio is the most recent example), no book has yet been published about the Third World Strike. We are having coffee on campus today at a place that is named the Free Speech Movement Café, but there is no Third World Strike Café. We do, however, have a Department of Ethnic Studies and African American Studies that honors the legacy of the strike.

Marino:

Why was El Teatro Campesino so important to the movement during this time, and in what ways do you see it as integral to this larger frame of social and political issues?

Muñoz:

What Luis Valdez did was unique in the sense that theater became central to a political struggle. It started out in the farm workers’ movement, and, as I have documented, Luis himself had been a farm worker in central California. He had been radicalized by the Cuban Revolution after visiting Cuba. He had also been part of the San Francisco Mime Troup. His Teatro Campesino dramatically and effectively rallied farmworkers to the cause. By 1968 he had begun to think in larger terms about contributing to the start of a radical Chicano movement and using El Teatro to dramatize the issues facing Mexican Americans beyond the factories or the fields. He left Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers (UFW), but he remained supportive of that struggle. I met him about that time, when I was president of UMAS and invited him to speak on our campus. He is very charismatic, very articulate, you know, an incredible speaker. His voice—what a beautiful voice! He spoke about the issues the Plan de Aztlán was about, and what he said made an impact on the students. He recruited actors from the campus, from the student activists. Ysidro Macias, one of the leaders of the 1969 Third World Strike, became a playwright and wrote a play called The Ultimate Pendejada that was performed by the Teatro Campesino.

Luis has not received the praise he deserves for opening doors not only in theater but in Hollywood. If it weren’t for El Teatro Campesino, I don’t think we would see as many Chicano/Latino/a actors as we see on the screen now. A lot of them had their learning experience in El Teatro Campesino. I think Luis deserves a full biography.

Marino:

As these stories are being told, we are also talking about how histories are being written and reproduced. How might you see the story of El Teatro Campesino in the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary and in terms of the calendar round?

Muñoz:

My hope is that the story of El Teatro Campesino inspires a renewed student activism not only among Latino/as but among students in general. We are living in perhaps the most repressive moment of this nation’s history. I think that it’s important that we do all we can to regenerate the vitality of student activism. It’s not that I think we should go back to the 1960s—it was a different moment at that time. I think that history repeats itself but not necessarily in the same way. A lot of people romanticize the 1960s. I think we did important things in the 1960s, but we didn’t make the revolution. And I think now at this point as an old man I can say we need a real revolution, a real revolution—not a violent one, because it’s not going anywhere, but a nonviolent revolution of values that Dr. King called for in which we begin to challenge the evils of capitalism and its two-party dictatorship in a creative way to take account of the complexities of the twenty-first century.

I don’t think such a revolution will take place before I pass on to the spirit world. But I think our children may witness it and, if not, then my grandchildren. Right now we’re sitting on a powder keg. So much bad stuff is going on at home and abroad. And at the same time we are in the process, in the midst, rather, of the privatization of this university and other public universities. And we’re having people taking power on these campuses who come from the private sector or government, such as our university president Janet Napolitano, who has never been an educator and who served as President Obama’s secretary of homeland security prior to taking over the UC system.

We need student activists to emerge to become our future leaders with a vision of an authentic multiracial democracy based on humanitarian values and with a government that is committed to social and environmental justice and peace, not war, as a means of resolving issues among nations. What I have learned from the struggles in which I have participated since the 1960s is that life is struggle and struggle is life. And that victory is in the struggle.