Josh Morris discusses the experiences of Latino/Latina organizers in the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan and CPUSA, covering an often ignored aspect of US Communist history.
On June 20th of this year, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) will celebrate its 100th-year-anniversary founding at their old hometown in Southside Chicago. There, its current cohort of activists, writers, teachers, industrial workers, service workers, and unionists will meet to plan their next 100 years in America. Among those leading the current generation of American communists is Rossana Cambron, a member of the Party’s Central (or National) Committee since 2014. Cambron’s current work with the Party involves focusing on membership engagement and developing the Party from its current form as a series of interlinked clubs into a regional political party. Cambron, however, has a history that is quite remarkable not for the history of American communists, but also of Latino history. Cambron’s origins of interest in the CPUSA was in fact extremely personal; linked to her experiences as a Latino woman in Southern California and the efforts of El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan (MEChA) to bring about equality and acceptance of her fellow students in the years subsequent to the Vietnam War.
During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, newly arrived Mexican immigrants made Hispanic Americans the fastest growing minority group in the United States. By 1980, Mexicans and Mexican Americans constituted about 60 percent of the country’s 14.6 million Hispanics. Many of these people took on the term Chicano(a), which Ruben Salazar noted as a term to describe “a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.” In the early 1970s, Hispanic organizers and intellectuals called for “a militant message of cultural pluralism,” ushering in a series of attempts to address ethnic concerns on California University campuses.1 MEChA emerged in 1969 as the result of Latino students from twelve University chapters across the country who decided to meet in California to decide a course of action for the future. The organization represented a vibrant aspect of the Mexican-American Civil Rights movement, also sometimes called the Chicano Civil Rights movement or El Movimiento. Latino students from the various university clubs met in Santa Barbara and drafted a document that highlighted the emotions and sentiments of their upbringings in an era where Civil Rights and second wave feminist reform seemed, to them, to focus more on the social dynamics of whites and non-whites. The founders of MEChA claimed that “[they] did not always have an organization to fight for their political rights” as Latinos, but instead commonly found themselves grouped in with all non-whites which ignored their unique cultural heritage, beliefs, and customs. MEChA set out to alter this course and provide Latinos access to a campus-based organization that would fight to sustain their civil rights as Latinos by promoting the expansion of ethnic studies programs at their local college campuses.2
The organization by its very nature was counter-cultural, anti-systemic, and in simple terms: radically progressive. They incorporated the traditional heroes of Civil Rights and minority justice, such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but also included Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong as their influential leaders. Because of this, MEChA is sometimes referenced as a contingent of the New Communist Movement (NCM), a grouping of radical organizations that emerged out of the New Left; identified by their rejection of both New Leftist approaches for progressive change as well as the “old guard” of radicals still found in the CPUSA.3 But MEChA did not achieve the broad levels of support it had by 1970 because of its ideological proclivities. Rather, many organizations throughout the NCM attracted students and marginalized youths for their message of embracing the ideals of the counter-cultural movement and rejecting the Old Guard of the Left. The promotion and defense of ethnic studies programs at Universities was one means of doing this; however, MEChA also promoted awareness of Latino history and culture during a time that numerous ethnic groups were searching for collaborationist means to achieve progress.
Between its founding in mid-1969 and throughout most of 1970, MEChA succeeded at gaining membership across University campuses through its promotion of ethnic studies but had little to work with in terms of a struggle for national attention. Between 1969 and 1971, MEChA operated sixteen campus chapters, including Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, Northridge, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Monica. Most of the effort to promote new ethnic studies programs were done on a campus-to-campus basis and the organization merely facilitated a cooperative approach to promoting ethnic and cultural diversity. The moment for a national spotlight came in August of 1970, when the organization began to participate in the Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War; one of the largest Chicano demonstrations in U.S. history. To draw the nation in, MEChA teamed up with the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) of Boulder , the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) of El Paso, and the Puerto Rican Student Union of New York. In total, the demonstration numbered over 25,000 Chicano students from across the country. In their mission statement, MEChA proposed to “link the struggle against U.S. aggression in Vietnam to the struggle for Chicano self-determination in the United States.” At the demonstration, the organizations popularized the phrases “Nuestra Guerra Esta Aqui, No Esta en Vietnam!” (Our War is Here not in Vietnam) and “Vietnam y Aztlan; Los dos Venceran!” (Vietnam as Aztlan; Both will Win!).4 By 1972, MEChA operated over 24 campus chapters and expanded their reach to community colleges and California State Universities.
As is common when a radical organization promoting civil rights obtains national spotlight, MEChA quickly saw political attacks subsequent to the organization’s involvement in the Moratorium. MEChA organizers later attributed the legal battles incurred in Southern California as the result of the FBI and local police who “used undercover agents and provocateurs to infiltrate [their] organizations and plant evidence later used to discredit the movement.” The tactics mirrored those used by the FBI against the CPUSA from 1941 to 1957, as well as the tactics of private “risk management” companies such as Corporations Auxiliary from 1916 to 1938. Although the era of the second red scare had long since passed by 1970, red-baiting, albeit in a slightly modified form, remained a canonical approach for dividing up activists. Subsequent to the political attacks, MEChA saw a decline in both membership and activities. Many organizers, lacking new students to fill the void, turned to part-time paid staff received from the Ethnic Studies departments at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, and UC Davis.
Outside of campus-based organizing, MEChA focused on the promotion of voter registration among California Latinos by urging students to join La Partida de Raza Unida, or LRUP, between 1970 and 1974. With the help of LRUP, MEChA formed a boycott committee for the Farah Garment Strike of 1972 in San Antonio, Texas, to support Cecilia Espinoza in her case Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Co (1973). Espinoza charged that the Farah Manufacturing Company violated her civil rights by refusing to hire her on the basis of her national origin (Mexico). The court held that the company’s refusal to hire Espinoza because she lacked U.S. citizenship did not constitute a violation of her rights under the Civil Rights Act. 5 The strike attracted the attention of numerous Latino rights organizations as far Northwest as San Francisco. Latino activists argued that the strike was akin to the efforts of the United Farmworkers and “a turning point in the struggle to organize the non-union Industries of the Southwest, where Chicanos work at the lowest-paid, hardest jobs.”6 It was around this time that numerous Chicano activists of MEChA, including numerous district leaders, turned to Marxism and began studying the works of Mao Zedong; attracted by its message of collectivist action to defend the rights of marginalized, ethnic workers. At first, the organization’s university clubs promoted courses on Marxism-Leninism and contemporary criticisms of American capitalism. By 1974, when MEChA organizers began participating in the August 29th Movement (ATM), the organization experienced an upsurge in both membership and community engagement throughout the Southern Southwest Latino community, which peaked two years later in 1976.7
MEChA’s moment to shine once again came when Allan Bakke claimed that he was the victim of reverse discrimination for his refused admittance into UC Davis, which was subsequently upheld by the California Supreme Court in 1976. MEChA’s mission was to resist efforts to attack affirmative action and special admissions and ultimately overturn the Court’s decision. In their mind, the decision represented a low point for Latinos specifically by opening the door for a return to pre-1960s conditions where Latino presence in Southern California Universities were less than 50 for every 30,000 students. Throughout 1977, MEChA organized thousands of statewide meetings and began to look for other supportive organizations to support their fight to overturn the Court’s ruling and maintain their courses on Marxism. The Los Angeles rally drew over 2,000 Chicano students and community groups who teamed up with Asian student organizations to make the movement a genuinely student-oriented, multi-cultural network of resistance. To continue their Marxist courses, MEChA turned to the Communist Party, which had the facility, staff, and more importantly the resources to teach summer-long courses. Additionally, MEChA worked with ATM to build a collaborative relationship with the Asian American communist organization, I Wor Kuen, in September, 1978. This latter move resulted in the formation of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist). By the end of 1979, MEChA had begun a transition to maintain their independence as an organization while retaining community-based support for the League and its goals of collaborating marginalized ethnicities.
The first time Rossana Cambron heard about communists, it was that they ate babies and murdered people with disabilities like her brother, who has down syndrome. As she remembered it, it was parallel to what she was taught about fascism and the Nazi regime, which did execute its own citizens who had disabilities. The daughter of an abusive father, Rossana, her mother, and her siblings left Texas and their family in Juarez to settle in the heart of East Los Angeles, at the Madavilla housing projects on what was then called Brooklyn Avenue (today it is called Cesar Chavez Drive), in the mid-1960s. Rossana eventually learned through her mother how her grandfather worked with the Socialistas de Muerte, a segment of socialist groups in Mexico, and gave her courage to learn more about activism and the defense of those in need, such as her disabled brother. Through her public education experiences, including college, Rossana became slowly exposed to the works of Marx, Lenin, Malcolm X, and Mao Zedong. While studying at Loyola Marymount, Rossana identified with MEChA’s message and history of activism between 1970 and 1974, leading to her joining the organization in 1976 not long after the battle to overturn the California Supreme Court decision on Allan Bakke.8
Arturo Cambron grew up the son of a truck driver and a singer and enjoyed a somewhat reasonable upbringing despite a family of thirteen brothers and sisters. Arturo, however, had to change his name in school to Arthur to avoid ridicule from his fellow white classmates, who typically expressed their parents’ distaste for Latin American presence in their community. For both Arturo and Rossana, the riots of South Central in 1965 represented a pivotal moment where young students began to question what would push people to the brink of rioting. Due to his conservative parents, however, Arturo remained inactive until 1970 when the schools in Montebello walked out in support of East Los Angeles. The walkouts, which attempted to address the unequal treatment of Latinos in the Los Angeles Unified School District, attracted Arturo’s attention regardless of his upbringing. In his final year of high school Arturo moved to La Habra after his father was rejected by numerous landlords, where he met young activists from MEChA. Within two years, Arturo was accepted to UCLA to study medicine and became heavily active in the MEChA chapter of the campus.9
Arturo described the UCLA MEChA chapter as “very radical” and fundamentally “Marxist” in its worldview, although their program did not necessarily reflect this identity. Rossana and Arturo saw MEChA as a Chicano movement that coincided with the African American liberation movement as well as the anti-Vietnam War movement, and above all a movement that embraced the identity of Chicano as a rejection of the label “Mexican-American.” After joining MEChA, Arturo abandoned his goal of studying medicine to become fully involved in his community, specifically defending programs for special admissions in 1977 during the Allan Bakke incident. This particular issue was important for the Cambrons because it encapsulated the fear held by whites should their privileges be threatened by those who lack said privileges. Arturo and his MEChA chapter responded to accusations of reverse racism by organizing students at not only UC campuses but also at Cal State campuses and community colleges. On one of his rotations across Southern and Central California, Arturo teamed up with his club to meet with other MEChA contingents at UC Davis. On the car ride he met Rossana, and within a year they were married.10
Although both considered themselves radical prior to joining MEChA, the organization represented a rallying call that they both personally identified with and could further expand upon by integrating themselves into what they called “the broader movement.” MEChA was able to bridge the gap that Rossana and Arturo both had individually against the radical Left imposed by their parent’s generation as well as mainstream American Cold War Culture. Rossana’s upbringing of seeing communists as anti-Christian, anti-disabilities, anti-peace groups was likely destroyed by the links drawn between what she was taught in MEChA and what she later experienced in the CPUSA courses offered for MEChA. This invariably led to a more open-minded assessment of Marxism. By 1978, Rossana felt that Marxism, as explained by her courses with the CPUSA, provided “clarity” on the various societal norms she had questioned, such as how does a society develop, what function do poor people serve in contrast to the rich, and how equality generates from social movements. Prior to her courses, Rossana did not engage with the classical works of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx because “there was never a kind of motivation” for such things; she grew up believing “these people were beyond [her] reach of comprehension.” After her courses, however, Rossana no longer “felt threatened” by philosophy and theory, and instead took those lessons back to MEChA in order to reassess the organization as an operative tool for Latinos.11
To Rossana, MEChA developed her sense of collective action and power but lacked a refined political theory that could be translated into a plan for political action in the long term. Instead, MEChA focused on individual, short-term battles to slowly turn the tide away from white privilege. In her own words, by late 1977 Rossana felt she “was hitting a wall” with MEChA. MEChA’s goals for 1978 and 1979 seemed pale and minute in comparison to the grand fight envisioned for all working people presented by the theoretical system of Marx. Additionally, the CPUSA’s courses helped break the idea that such a fight was to be led by whites, as the Party has a rich and vibrant history with the struggle for both African American and Latino equality dating back to the early 1930s.10 By mid-1978, leaving MEChA and joining the CPUSA simply made sense to Rossana and her new husband, Arturo. In 1979, both began their first work with the CPUSA by gathering signatures in Southern California to place Gus Hall and Angela Davis on the presidential ballot. Throughout the 1980s, Arturo worked at an overnight delivery service called Lumas, where he focused his time and energy into the local Teamster’s Union. In a matter of years, Arturo went from pursuing a degree in medicine to battling corporate efforts to use company unions throughout California.12
A considerate component to Marxism was how its assessment of struggle translated into a viable political alternative that Rossana and Arturo believed many Americans deal with on a regular basis; a struggle of individualism versus collective action, of concern for the communities but enacting change at the national level versus the local level, and the endorsing of ideas and strategies that may be responded to with violence and hate. Rossana described being a Marxist in America as “very difficult,” where one can be firm in their stances on capitalism yet proud of their children for succeeding within it. This, in part, captures the complexity of being a radical. Rossana believes that a common misperception of communists in American history among the general public is that they lacked patriotism and respect for the United States. While throughout the early 20th century many communists made a name for themselves because of their pro-Soviet, anti-Western stances, this was not the case for the majority of American communists. Rossana did not see the entire second red scare from 1947 – 1957 as a judgment of patriotism among citizens of a certain political persuasion; she saw it as a violation of Constitutional rights. Rossana sees no contradiction in valuing the United States as a Christian nation while simultaneously upholding the virtues of Marxism. Much like a biblical sacrifice, Rossana believed “it is a selfless act to give up your time” for your fellow citizens build on “a passion, a love for humanity.”11
The experiences of the Cambrons reveal two important factors for American history and the history of Latinos in the United States. First, their experiences demonstrate how some Latinos, especially youths, were quickly radicalized and exposed to Marxist philosophy through student-based community organizations focusing on promoting ethnic studies and Latino rights such as MEChA, UMAS, and MAYO. Today, MEChA is going through its own internal changes as it addresses concerns about the organization’s identity that could be perceived as racially exclusive and homophobic. In April of 2019, the organization chose to end the use of certain gender-exclusive terms, such as Chicano/a. For MEChA organizers, the 1970s was a situational moment where the fight against white privilege in the Universities mixed with the CPUSA’s need for more dedicated members and organizers for community events.13 Radicalization can occur for a variety of reasons, but one of the easiest ways to understand it is by seeing how individuals such as the Cambrons link personal experiences with the broader message of struggle. Rossana and Arturo were attracted to MEChA because they believed it was a means for them to get personally involved in their community’s struggle against white privilege. When exposed to the works of Marx and Lenin, the personal links between struggle and oppression, already forged by MEChA, mixed with a theoretical solution to depict a plight shared by all Latinos and supported by the notion that it was not just Mexican-Americans or African-Americans experiencing this struggle: it was experienced by working-class Americans as a whole.
Secondly, the Cambrons demonstrated a continued tradition of radicalism among Latino youths that dates back to the 1910s and 1920s. Throughout its history, the CPUSA attracted Latino organizers from across the Southwest and in parts of Chicago, in large part due to the Party’s depiction of racial oppression as a component to capitalist hegemony that must be overcome. In 1939, Emma Tenayuca became one of the most prominent Latino organizers associated with the CPUSA when she published an article in The Communist on the how Latinos were in the same position as African Americans; subjugated as a nation within a nation struggling to both integrate into mainstream society while also maintaining their cultural heritage. The New Communist Movement (NCM) that emerged out of the 1960s seized on the momentum of these people in a wide variety of groups, including the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) the CPUSA, and the more radical sects of student organizations promoting ethnic rights such as MEChA. Rossana and Arturo’s entrance into the CPUSA by 1979 validated the fact that American communist groups still held attractive stances for minority youths, even those of modest backgrounds, and provided possible outlets to both vent their frustrations as well as study methods for engaging with their community for change.
Today, Rossana continues her passion as a Central (National) Committee member of the CPUSA, helping to try and modernize the organization’s engagement and outreach programs, including helping redevelop the Youth Communist League (YCL). Rossana’s work with the Los Angeles CPUSA centered on civic involvement, study groups, and advocating the rights of Latinos in the workplace and public sphere. Her election to the National Committee of the Party occurred in 2014 when the CPUSA held its first major nationwide conference in almost a decade at its founding town in Southside Chicago. Her election also marked the first Latino woman to hold such a ranking position in the Party. Despite a significant age gap in representation on the Committee, and a slow pace at reforming political theory, the work of members such as Rossana have led to a much more demographically diverse organization than the CPUSA of 60 years ago. This, if anything, is a positive development for a Party seeking to return to its ethnically and culturally diverse roots from 100 years ago.
- Steven M. Gillon, “The Clash of Cultures,” in The American Paradox, Third (Boston: Wadsworth Press, 2013), 248–49.
- “MEChA Official National Website – Movimiento estudiantil,” MEChA Official National Website, accessed June 4, 2019, http://www.chicanxdeaztlan.org/.
- The Struggle for Chicano Liberation,” Journal of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, no. 2 (August 1979).
- “MEChA Chapters Map,” accessed June 4, 2019, http://depts.washington.edu/moves/MEChA_map.shtml.
- Espinoza, et vir v. Farah Manufacturing Company, 414 U.S. 86; 94 S. Ct. 334; 38 L. Ed. 2d 287 (Supreme Court of the United States 1973).
- The San Fransisco Bay Area Farah Strike Support Committee, “Chicanos Strike at Farah” (United Front Press, January 1974), Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org), https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/farah.pdf.
- Ignacio M. Garciá, United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party (Tuscon: MASRC, University of Arizona, 1989); “Los Angeles County La Raza Unida Newsletter,” April 28, 1971, Herman Baca Papers, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego.
- Rossana Cambron, Interview by Author, Digital Recording, April 25, 2012.
- Arturo Cambron, Interview by Author, Digital Recording, May 17, 2012.
- Cambron.
- Cambron, Interview by Author, April 25, 2012.
- Cambron, Interview by Author, May 17, 2012.
- “MEChA Official National Website – Movimiento estudiantil.”