BY OLGA RODRÍGUEZ
Printed below is the new preface to The Politics of Chicano Liberation. The book is being re-issued by Pathfinder Press this month. The preface is copyright Pathfinder Press and is reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
BY OLGA RODRIGUEZ
The Politics of Chicano Liberation, first published nearly twenty years ago, presents a working-class program in the fight for Chicano liberation. The book is based on reports and resolutions that draw on decades of experience in the fight to defend the rights of immigrant workers, including the concrete experiences of members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance who participated in the battles for equality and self- determination the Chicano people fought in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The perspectives put forward were a contribution to discussions among Chicanos on how to confront the new challenges opened by the employers' offensive during the 1974-75 recession.
The lessons of those battles are also valuable today as working people and youth mount resistance to new assaults, such as the spirited and determined marches against the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in California. The struggles covered in this volume that a new generation of fighters will find invaluable include the battles to unionize the mainly Chicano and Mexicano farmworkers from California to Ohio, to defend undocumented immigrant workers from deportation, and to extend civil and trade union rights to this section of the working class in the United States.
Chicano Moratorium
Also richly documented are the Chicano Moratorium
against the U.S. imperialist slaughter in Vietnam and the
disproportionate numbers of Chicano youth dying in that
war, the fight for bilingual-bicultural education and
affirmative action in hiring and in education, and the
initial thrust toward independent political action of the
working class and the oppressed, signified by the emergence
of the independent Chicano political formations, the Raza
Unida parties, that began to challenge the capitalist
Democratic and Republican parties' stranglehold over
politics.
At the time the first edition was printed in 1977, the offensive by the wealthy owners of big business against labor began to intensify. As the 1976 resolution "The Crisis of Capitalism and the Struggle for Chicano Liberation" notes, with the onset of a long-term and irreversible period of economic stagnation, the capitalist rulers would more and more seek to shift a disproportionate burden of their crisis onto workers, especially those from oppressed nationalities. This, the resolution said, will be "felt with particular acuteness in three areas, each of which has already generated important struggles: the fight for jobs and against discriminatory hiring and layoff practices; the fight against deportations and racist immigration policies; and the fight for an equal education, and bilingual-bicultural education."
These and other trends noted in the book have become permanent features of social, political, and economic life in the 1990s. The fight for Chicano liberation today is a fight to defend the basic rights and other conquests that Chicanos and the working class as a whole won in the struggles of late 1960s and early 1970s, in order to prepare for bigger struggles as the worldwide imperialist crisis takes on harsher and more devastating proportions.
Fight for immigrant rights
The documents in this volume can be of particular value
to those who joined protests last year against Proposition
187, a chauvinist measure that would deny undocumented
workers and their children access to public education,
health care, and other social services. For many among the
seventy thousand students, other youth, and workers who
took to the streets of Los Angeles in October 1994-and
among the tens of thousands of students who walked out of
their classes across California a month later-the actions
were their first jolt into politics.
Chicano workers and youth played a leading role in that fight because of the dual character of the oppression Chicanos suffer: discriminated against as a people because of race, culture, and language, and exploited as wage workers, because the Chicano nationality is substantially working class in its composition. The identity between Chicanos and their Mexican brothers and sisters is deep on both sides of the border. It is this that helps to impel Chicanos into the vanguard of the actions in solidarity with workers who emigrate to the imperialist centers.
The nationalist "America first" campaign has become a central theme of Democratic and Republican party politicians alike. They hope to shift the blame for the deep-going crisis of capitalism away from the wealthy minority and onto the most vulnerable sections of the working class in the United States, including undocumented immigrant workers. For the U.S. labor movement, rejecting this chauvinist, divide-and-conquer approach must become a central issue if it is to take on the ongoing employer assault on the rights, wages, and living standards of working people in the United States.
Indeed, the scapegoating of immigrant workers is a worldwide phenomenon from Bonn to Tokyo, Melbourne to Paris, Ottawa to Athens. This sharply poses the need for independent, working-class solidarity and political action on a world scale-not the narrow nationalist, xenophobic, and chauvinist measures that the politicians of the imperialist ruling classes are pressing.
Borders begin to break down
The growing parasitism and volatility of capitalism in
crisis means that the near collapse of the Mexican economy
in December 1994 and its devastating impact on working
people will be repeated, in varying forms, in country after
country dominated by imperialism. And that means that more
and more workers and farmers from Latin America, Asia, and
Africa will be driven to cross the borders into the
imperialist centers in search of jobs and a life for their
families.
The fighting spirit of the workers and youth who took part in the protests against Proposition 187 helps to break down the borders erected by imperial capitalism that separate us from our class brothers and sisters around the world. Just as the growing numbers of Chicano, Mexicano, and other immigrant workers in the industrial working class and trade unions strengthen the U.S. labor movement, so too, the influx of immigration into the imperialist centers around the world adds to the potential power, unity, and revolutionary capacities of the working class worldwide.
The lessons of the battles fought by the Chicano and Mexicano peoples contained in this book, together with Pathfinder's The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working- Class Politics and the Trade Unions, can help contribute to a deeper understanding among the generations of working- class fighters coming forward today. They can learn how the oppressed and exploited, rejecting the role of powerless "victim" that capitalism tries to consign them to, can move to center stage to mount a revolutionary struggle in which workers and youth will take their destiny into their own hands.
August 17, 1995