Undocumented in America

rodríguez: I was born in 1944 in Torreón, Coahuila, but my family comes from the northern mountains of Durango. My father was a Communist and a trade union leader. When I was five we moved to Ciudad Juárez, on the border. In 1953 my father went to work in the us as a farmworker, under the Bracero quota scheme that was in place then.footnote² That same year, when I was nine, I got deported from the us—I was working as a shoe-shine boy and had gone over to El Paso for the day, but was picked up within a few hours. Three years later, in 1956, I crossed the border for good with my mother and brothers, arriving in Los Angeles that August. We lived in the city centre, and could smell the noxious fumes from the meatpacking plants and other industries. I went to the public junior high school; there was no ‘English as a Second Language’ programme then, just ‘Foreign Adjustment’ schemes. My first act of rebellion was in music class, when we were forced to sing patriotic American songs; I refused. As a punishment they put me at the back of the class. Mexicans were constantly being reminded of their difference: we would be called ‘wetback’ and ‘tj’—short for Tijuana. We all felt the discrimination and exclusion, and began to think about fighting back against it. In 1965 we held a demonstration against police brutality in our neighbourhood. From there I jumped into political activity, entering the radical Latino wing of the Civil Rights movement.

díaz: My family is originally from Aguascalientes, Mexico, but I was born in la in 1964, one of seven children. I was raised in Chino. We had a big house, but we lived poor: we didn’t get our first television until I was fourteen. As I was growing up I saw my parents help a lot of immigrants: they lived in a trailer at the back of our yard, worked with my father in landscaping or helped my mother round the house. As a child I was aware of the Chicano movement—I would see the Brown Beret marches going down Central Avenue—and experienced discrimination and racism, especially from the police. But I didn’t really connect with the movement until I got to college in 2000.

rodríguez: After 1965 I became involved in a local Chicano organization called Casa Carnalismo—Mexican slang for ‘brotherhood’—which mobilized people from the neighbourhood and college students. The struggle for Latino labour and civil rights was gathering pace at this time: in California, César Chávez of the National Farm Workers Association led the grape pickers’ strike in 1965, and the next year, Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzáles, a former prize-fighter, set up the Denver-based Crusade for Justice, the first Mexican American civil rights organization; in 1967, Reies López Tijerina and his Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance for Land Grants) seized a courthouse in New Mexico. Student groups began to form on campuses. In California, Chicano organizers came into contact with Black activists—the Panthers, George Jackson, Angela Davis—and played a role in the wider struggles against discrimination, racism, police brutality and the Vietnam War. In 1970, the Chicano Moratorium movement against the war organized a big march in East la which the police broke up in an infamous rampage, killing three people.

In mid 1974, several of us from Carnalismo decided to join forces with Bert Corona—a legendary figure in the immigrants’ rights movement. He was from the binational community in El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, but had come to California in the 1930s, working as a longshoreman before becoming a labour organizer. In 1968 he and Soledad Alatorre founded casa, the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo, which aimed to organize the immigrant community and provide them with legal advice, documentation, help with housing and so on. The number of undocumented Mexican workers had increased substantially after the end of the Bracero Program in 1964. casa was the first to organize undocumented immigrants, though it also focused more generally on working-class Mexican-Americans. casa eventually disintegrated amid major political divisions in 1978.