Chicano Power

The hypnotic eyes of a 1960s Chicano activist with flowing long hair and a Che Guevara look have beamed like headlights through a morning fog from the wall of a housing project along Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles for more than half a century. “We Are Not a Minority,” the mural’s message states simply. For almost as long, Latino activists, the media, and even advertisers have unashamedly hailed each succeeding decade as the time of the Hispanic in America with a near-messianic fervor signaling long-awaited expectations that have always ended in equally disappointing frustration. 
Those symbolic mural eyes, however, may have finally found their way through clearer skies in the 21st century, almost five long decades after the days of the Latino civil rights movement spawned by Cesar Chavez’s labor organizing in the California fields and the disjointed activism for Chicano Power in Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. What has become evident in Los Angeles, as in other parts of the country, is a dramatically changed sociological, cultural and political landscape. Chicano Power, once made up exclusively of Mexican American aspirations and activism, has become Latino Power and a movement extending throughout America. From Florida to Texas, through the Midwest and into the West, the incredible population growth of Hispanics has transformed their role in the country, reminding an America apprehensive of how to deal with its changing demographics that they are only among the latest vestiges of what has always been a nation of immigrants. 
“We are all just a generation or two removed from someone who made our future the purpose of their lives,” Florida’s junior U.S. Senator Marco Rubio told Americans during the 2012 presidential campaign, which brought Latino political power into national focus as never before. “America is the story of everyday people, who did extraordinary things. A story woven deep into the fabric of our society.” 
The achievement of a Cuban immigrant’s son in Florida, becoming a United States senator, and similarly the historic election to the U.S. Senate from Texas of another Cuban American, Ted Cruz, dramatize how the American Dream is alive and well, no matter the heritage, culture or religion. It is a point that Hispanics throughout the country, in various fields and professions, have driven home again and again in recent decades as old ways fossilized and died. America loves metaphorical images of changes transforming the nation, and perhaps for many the arrival of Latino Power was best symbolized in the new millennium with the historic 2005 election of Antonio Villaraigosa as the first Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles in modern times. With Villaraigosa walking triumphantly from his Inaugural Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels to City Hall -- accompanied by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles no less, in addition to family and thousands of Latino well-wishers – the inspiring scene riveted the attention of the country, if not beyond, to the seemingly quixotic rise of a new political force in the one American city long associated with the romance of Hispanics in the new world. 
“The Latino agenda,” Villaraigosa declared that day, “has become America’s agenda.” 
When Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America was published by E. P. Dutton in 1974, America was still sobering up from the intoxicating headiness of the social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s, and the national psyche was on the mend from the political violence and corruption that had shattered and humbled the country. What lay ahead in those next few decades was an educational, political, and legal mine field that moved racial-ethnic relations into conflicts over affirmative action, quotas, minority preferences, and a cultural cold war about equality and meritocracy that rages on today. It rages on but with the upside for Latinos being leaders like the Castro brothers, Julian and Joaquin, of San Antonio who make no secret that without some of those advantages they would never have had a chance to be scholars at Stanford or earn law degrees from Harvard. 
“My grandmother didn’t live to see us begin our lives in public service,” said Julian Castro, who in 2012 became the first Latino to deliver a presidential nominating convention keynote address. “But she probably would’ve thought it extraordinary that just two generations after she arrived in San Antonio, one grandson would be the mayor and the other would be on his way -- the good people of San Antonio willing -- to the United States Congress! 
“In the end, the American Dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don’t always cross the finish line in the span of one generation. But each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor.” 
And yet, as Julian Castro became a rising star in the Democratic Party, no Latino better represented the chasm that still exists between political promise and political reality in Texas. The Lone Star State had once been part of the solid Democratic South, peaking at the height of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Latinos had been part of the state’s ruling Democratic coalition, and today the state is almost forty percent Hispanic. In Julian Castro’s lifetime, however, Texas politics had change dramatically. This now is a Republican bastion where not a single one of Texas’ twenty-nine statewide offices is held by a Democrat. “For me, or for any Democrat,” says Castro, “something has to change in the state before a Democrat is going to get elected.” 
So much, then, for all that political bravado of a Hispanic president, a phrase that had become part of the lexicon of many of today’s Latino activists after the election of a black American president. Latino political aspirations were nothing new, but today they are also part of a powerful dynamic transforming the Latino ethnic composition, to what long-range impact no one can say. 
It has meant that Latino Power, too, has entered a new phase, a phase of a broadened identity that also calls for meeting old challenges renewed as more subtle but nevertheless obstructive roadblocks. And it raises the question of whether the younger generation of Hispanics, like their African-American counterparts, is “better than we were on these issues,” as President Barack Obama has suggested. 
In short, what has been the legacy left to the next generation? 
“Do we want our children to inherit our hopes and dreams, or do we want them to inherit our problems?” as Senator Marco Rubio has asked. “If we succeed in changing the direction of our country, our children and grandchildren will be the most prosperous generation ever, and their achievements will astonish the world. 
“The story of our time will be written by Americans who haven’t yet been born. Let’s make sure they write that we did our part.”