Speaker: 00:00:03

just caveat and say that anything that could potentially go wrong today seems to have.

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if my sleeping toddler wakes up while my wife is also at the house, that's a high

possibility right now.

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So if you hear a three-year-old scream, that is what it is.

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This week, I am issuing an apology on behalf of myself and the podcast.

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In the previous 90 episodes of this show, we have discussed slavery, the African American

experience, immigration, Asian American and Native American history numerous times.

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We have discussed slavery, the African-American experience, immigration, Asian-American

and Native American history numerous times.

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And yet we have not directly addressed the problematic experiences of Mexican, Latino and

Hispanic people in the US.

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Until now.

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So this week, we're heading over to 1960s Chicago, a city that poured fuel on the already

explosive issue of civil rights during a period of extraordinary national transformation.

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As I ask.

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What were the Latino urban riots?

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To discuss this, I am joined by...

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I'm going to re-record that intro afterwards, one of those days.

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m Yeah.

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by the way, I wanted to say um in terms of my title, you could, um it's, you could just

say professor of history.

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You don't have to say director of graduate studies.

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Just correct that.

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Wonderful.

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Thank you.

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Who discussed this?

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I am joined by a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, specializing

in the history of Latinos in the mid to late 20th century U.S.

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Her books include Brown in the Windy City, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago,

which there is a link to in the show notes if you're interested in reading, which I highly

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recommend.

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Welcome to the podcast, Lillia Fernandez.

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Thank you.

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Really great to have you, Lillia.

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And I'm also joined today by an associate professor in the Department of History at

Rutgers University.

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Her research explores ideas about rights and equality in the 20th century Americas with a

focus on Latin American history.

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And her books include Puerto Rican citizen.

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Her books include Puerto Rico citizen, history and political identity in 20th century New

York City.

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Again, all of that is in the show notes.

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A big hello to Lauren Thomas.

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Thank you.

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Liam, eh actually, think especially for the purposes of this podcast, it would be great to

list the book, the second book, um which maybe uh I didn't, it's on my bio.

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um It's called Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights.

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Do you want me to, do you see it?

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I have that now, just going to copy and paste that into my introduction and redo that for

you.

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And it's co-authored with another historian at Rutgers Aldo Loria Santiago, who actually

has done more specific research on urban riots in the mid Atlantic US than I have.

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um So it's a really relevant resource for this material.

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Yeah, that's not a problem.

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I will ah just amend that.

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Okay, I'll just quickly do that intro again for you.

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uh And I am also joined by an associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers

University.

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Her research explores ideas about rights and equality in the 20th century Americas with a

focus on Latin American history.

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And her books include Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights, the Rutgers Latino

Studies Research Initiative, which she co-authored with Aldo A.

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Loria Santiago.

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Again, that is in the show notes along with all of her other amazing work.

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A big hello to Lauren Thomas.

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Really great to have you on the podcast and thank you both for joining me for this.

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I guess first off, because a lot of our listeners, particularly international ones, maybe

don't have a lot of understanding about this aspect of, I guess we can call part of the

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civil rights era.

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So Lillia, I wonder if you could provide some context and paint a picture for us of what

post-war Chicago looks like.

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Sure.

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Well first I would back up for a moment and just um say that um Latinos, people of Latin

American descent or origin, have a much longer history in the United States than I think

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most people realize.

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um And just um to promote a resource if folks are interested, I highly recommend the PBS

documentary called Latino Americans that came out several years ago and which I um use

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frequently in my teaching that covers the history of uh Spanish-speaking people or those

who were colonized by the Spanish in the Americas going back to the 16th century and their

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presence.

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in places like Florida, the US Southwest, even as far north as the Midwest.

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So in a place like Chicago, which really you might recall is a central hub or has been a

central hub for the nation, a kind of transit point between East and West, North and

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South.

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Mexican immigrants have been coming to the region since the late 1800s, early 1900s.

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But was really after, uh during and after World War I, when the numbers started to grow

and during as well during the Mexican Revolution.

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When people were fleeing the political turbulence and violence in Mexico, that the numbers

of Mexican immigrants in Chicago began increasing.

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Now those numbers declined somewhat during the Great Depression when public officials

decided to deport or repatriate uh many immigrants.

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And so in the 1940s during World War II and in the years after was when we first started

to see the numbers increase significantly.

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uh Mexicans, Mexican-Americans also who were already in the US and lived in Texas for

example, along with Puerto Ricans started migrating to places like Chicago because they

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were booming in terms of industrial production during m and even after the war for some

time.

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So they were coming either being directly recruited by employers, they were coming on

government contracts as temporary workers,

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uh being encouraged to migrate by the Puerto Rico Migration Division or coming on their

own through word of mouth to reconnect with family members or because you know someone was

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already there in Chicago.

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So the population was growing in this period after World War II.

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Most folks were settling in industrial areas.

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So that would be the near west side of Chicago, uh south Chicago, where a lot of the steel

mills were located.

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uh Or in the back of the yards or packing town area where the slaughterhouses and the

stockyards were located.

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And again, many of them would have been coming to those kinds of jobs in this period.

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So how does that in Chicago compare demographically to the rest of the US at that time?

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Lauren, do you want to take that?

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Well, guess the, I mean, Mexico migration from Mexico and from other parts of the United

States, Mexican Americans who were coming to Chicago from elsewhere in the U.S.

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by the early 50s, the population was close to 100,000.

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Is that right, Lilia in Chicago or like 75,000, something like that.

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It was substantial.

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And um I mean, there were other, you know, most parts of the mid-Atlantic, the urban areas

of the mid-Atlantic were attracting um more and more Puerto Rican migrant laborers in the

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same era.

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Puerto Rican, the earliest Puerto Rican communities in the Eastern United States, I'm not

talking about Florida, which had actually attracted Puerto Rican independence fighters in

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the 19th century um when they were fighting off Spain um in the 1860s through the 1890s.

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But starting in the 1910s and accelerating the 1920s, um New York, and then some

surrounding um smaller cities,

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attracted Puerto Rican workers um who wanted to find more opportunity.

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so these sort of processes of migration of people seeking work was something that was

familiar in any urban area in the US.

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there were, uh I think there's also some

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productive comparison to the history of African Americans in the early 20th century.

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I think many of your listeners may have heard of the great migration of African Americans

from the US South.

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uh And people migrated to cities all over the United States.

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mean, in waves.

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Initially, in the 20s and 30s, was cities kind of closer to whatever southern states

people were coming from.

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but increasingly by World War II, people were going out West and successive waves of

workers came to Chicago, to Gary, Indiana, to Detroit, to New York City.

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And so there were these kind of heterogeneous populations of labor migrants in cities.

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um And many of them, I mean, certainly the people who were

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classified as or identified as African American or Latino, experienced various forms of

racial discrimination.

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um And especially this was difficult in housing and employment.

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And so, you know, the kind of conditions in the 1950s that preceded the era of urban riots

were shared conditions of struggle um in just kind of

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finding economic stability, uh dignity in their lives and their communities.

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um And so that's the kind of more general starting point for what we think of as the

social upheaval of the mid and late 1960s.

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Yeah, I think it's so easy when we think about early 20th century US in this sort of

heavily kind of segregated and prejudiced era to sort of think of it as just, you know,

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white and black without wanting to be too crude about that simplification.

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it will be really interesting to know kind of how that prejudice and discrimination was

projected towards Latino communities as well.

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Yeah, and um to go back to your um question, because I realize now I think you were asking

about how the demographics compared uh nationally to other parts of the country.

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What I would say to that is that uh Chicago did not have the largest Mexican population um

in this period, in the 1950s and 60s, nor did it have the largest Puerto Rican population.

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New York had the largest uh Puerto Rican uh numbers.

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And the Southwest, particularly cities like uh Los Angeles, San Antonio, Texas, um and

elsewhere had large uh Mexican populations.

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But um to address, I guess, the conditions that people were encountering, know, when

migrants had started arriving to US cities in the 1920s, there was much more integration,

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much more um coexistence, multiracial and multicultural communities, I would say.

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As the numbers started to increase, then that's when we began to see much more rigid

segregation or much more um explicit forms of prejudice and discrimination.

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Like the kind of housing, sorry to interrupt you, Lillia, but the kind of housing

discrimination that pushed people into increasingly, know, neighborhoods where

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increasingly nearly everybody was black or brown and increasingly poor instead of mixed

class, race neighborhoods, which were far more common before the 1930s and 40s.

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Yes, and I think that the nation's m ethos, the kind of the culture was very different as

well.

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Whereas before World War II, uh Americans recognized or at least tolerated much more

ethnic and national diversity among the European immigrants who were in the country.

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After World War II, particularly as the nations uh called to unite in the war effort,

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uh and people are essentially asked to shed their ethnicity or their nationality, the

lines between those who are white and those who are non-white become much sharper.

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And so in that moment, uh Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans, of

course, uh become much more visible and seen much more as different and as other.

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Yeah, the term minority populations had been popular in the US in, I just actually

published or am close to publishing an article about this in the Journal of Social

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History.

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The term was popular in the 1930s and 40s, but after World War II and when it was popular,

it minority meant anyone who was not kind of born in the United or sorry, their ancestors

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were not born in the United States.

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by the early 19th century.

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m But um after World War II, uh white ethnics just kind of drifted out of this minority

category.

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And it was very clear in a lot of the public discourse that what minority meant by the

early 1950s was people who were marked as uh black or brown.

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em And um so in a place like Chicago, which is

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I mean, it's true, as Lilia pointed out, Chicago did not have the largest Mexican-American

population or the largest Puerto Rican population, but it was distinctive, uh if not

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exactly unique, but it had the largest combined population of Puerto Rican and Mexican um

labor migrants and increasingly a second generation by the early 1960s.

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And so this was the place where m

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Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans brought together their histories of labor migration

and their experiences of prejudice and discrimination often in other places.

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mean, some of the, many of the people involved in the riots in the mid sixties in Chicago,

some had been born in Chicago, but many had not.

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um And it was, it was this uh exceptionally kind of

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uh heterogeneous Latino population, which certainly was not true of any other city or

place in the United States at that point in, you know, in the fifties and sixties.

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So how segregated was life between Latino communities and white communities in Chicago and

in other cities?

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Well, in Chicago, would say, initially, when people were arriving, they obviously had to

come to existing neighborhoods.

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So they oftentimes did live among Italian Americans, Polish Americans, and others.

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uh Not always peacefully.

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At times, there was discrimination and prejudicial sentiment towards them.

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uh But as urban renewal policies uh unfolded,

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in places like Chicago and people were forced to move out of those older neighborhoods and

into new areas where they had not lived in significant numbers.

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There the tensions and the conflicts increased significantly.

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So as Mexican Americans, for example, started moving southward to the Pilsen neighborhood,

which by its name should suggest that it was, you know, had Czech, Bohemian origins, ah

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they encountered a lot of

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you know, conflict and tension there with existing residents.

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As Puerto Ricans were moving northward into Westtown and Humboldt Park, again, with a lot

of Eastern European immigrants, there also they were experiencing some discrimination and

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rejection from local residents.

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And this, of course, extended to uh relations with police and law enforcement, which we

can talk about because that leads directly to

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the tensions and conflicts that erupt in violence.

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And I will say, do you want me to address the question in the New York context, Liam?

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Yeah, by all means just follow on and go for it.

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yeah, so I mean, I think that a similar pattern was true in New York, the pattern Lillia

described in Chicago, which is that early migrants, they had, as we said before, had lived

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in fairly heterogeneous, or actually extremely heterogeneous neighborhoods that were

increasingly becoming sort of sorted by ethnicity and race, and then uh urban renewal

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accelerated that.

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in extreme ways and then concentrated people who were experiencing the most housing

discrimination or the most kind of employment discrimination and impoverishment into

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certain neighborhoods.

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So the kind of overall uh segregation of people of color compared to whites in New York

was...

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increasing dramatically by the mid-1960s.

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Regarding the conflicts with police, which was, um as we'll get to when we talk about the

story of this specific riot in Chicago, was the precipitating cause.

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um But those conflicts were also longstanding sources of resentment and um

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a focus of organizing effort by, certainly by Puerto Ricans.

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I'm not sure about the history of Mexican Americans in Chicago and how much people had

kind of articulated their resentments before the 1960s about this.

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I'm sure Lillia can talk about that.

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But for Puerto Ricans in New York, um I mean, this was kind of a complaint from the very

beginning.

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uh records of migrants who came as um in the 1920s who described the police um as brutal

and racist.

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One oral history I read of a migrant who'd arrived in the 1930s said, for us the police

were like the Gestapo.

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I mean, that might sound like hyperbole, but um you know, bringing kind of uh

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unpredictable violence and kind of like efforts to control the population into these

migrant immigrant neighborhoods was something that Puerto Ricans experienced, had

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experienced for decades before the 1960s, before the era of riots that were, I I would

venture to guess that if you studied all of the incidents

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um And our colleague Aldo describes the riots of this era pretty expansively as just kind

of, let me, I can't actually, you're gonna have to edit this out.

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can't find his, um okay, our colleague Aldo Loria Santiago describes these um episodes of

rioting and unrest.

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pretty expensively as rioting.

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and large-scale confrontations.

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Sorry, I'll say that again.

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He describes these episodes of unrest expansively as riots, revolts, and large-scale

confrontations, most often confrontations with police, sometimes inter-ethnic

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confrontation.

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But if you examined all of these and...

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uh I mean, there were dozens in the mid Atlantic between the mid 1960s and the early

1970s.

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If you examine them, I would venture to guess that more than 90 % were precipitated by a

specific incident involving the police.

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But of course, that specific incident was preceded by years and sometimes decades of

frustration and

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kind of experience with over policing, hyper surveillance.

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um And in New York in particular, I'm actually not sure when what this special police

force called the Tactical Patrol Force was started.

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um But that was something that community members, mean, both community leaders and

participants in riots and confrontations with police

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cited over and over and over as a kind of a source of uh conflict.

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I mean, they brought in conflict, they brought in trouble and violence, and they also

represented this kind of uh extreme control or effort to control these communities.

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And I, sorry, go on, Lillia.

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I was going to say, I can give a little bit of background, I guess that would precede this

perhaps, you know, in the editing, if you want to talk about the presence of police in

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urban areas and the, you know, how these tensions developed.

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Yeah, in fact, I was actually, just gonna ask more specifically about that because, you

know, I think, I'm not sure everything you were saying, Lauren, is quite as hyperbolic as

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maybe you think when you consider that, you know, police brutality is something that uh

Americans in particular are still dealing with today.

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But, uh yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's some people out there.

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that might not be hyperbole either.

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mean, similar tactics and not too dissimilar goals.

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Yeah.

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but I guess, Lili, it would be, it would be good to get a little bit more, color around

this in terms of, what, what was that relationship?

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And, and, and also, I guess what I'm really building up to here, kind of what were these,

what were these kind of key events that, that kind of lit the flame that eventually

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triggered the riot?

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Yeah, so, you know, we might recall that, you know, police generally were meant to um keep

the peace, so to speak, in urban areas.

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In many cities, they were there to control uh workers, to control the population.

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You know, this was a form of social control to make the streets, um you know, pleasant and

accessible for more middle upper class um residents.

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And so the police had a long history of

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you know, harassing, know, roughing up uh people in poor working class areas.

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uh They often broke up um labor strikes and those kinds of uprisings, right, in the late

1800s and early 1900s.

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um And they didn't have particularly good relations with whoever the most recent immigrant

group was at the times.

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So whether it was Italians, uh

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or other Southern Eastern European immigrants.

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And recall that the police generally tended to be um Northern and Western Europeans.

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So they were Irish and German primarily, or had British um origins.

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But...

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As Mexicans began arriving in cities like Chicago, the police did not treat them very

well.

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could be rude and rough with them, express their prejudice towards them.

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And particularly as Puerto Ricans began to arrive, and again, negative stereotypes about

the population circulated, uh the police could be pretty harsh with young people in

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particular, with young men especially.

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The other thing to remember is that in many of these urban neighborhoods, there was a long

tradition of gangs, neighborhood or ethnic gangs that formed either along ethnic lines or

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nationality um or along geographical boundaries.

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So when Mexicans and Puerto Ricans arrived to a place like Chicago, they often also formed

into gangs to protect themselves, to defend themselves from, you know, uh

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other young men in the streets.

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And so the police, you know, uh could be violent towards them and trying to uh repress

them and such.

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But the key moment that set off the first uprising in Chicago in June of 1966 was after

the mayor, Richard uh J.

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Daley, uh had designated the first week in June as Puerto Rico week.

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So was supposed to be a week to celebrate

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Puerto Rican heritage, uh know, supposed to be a week planned with festivities and parades

and you know, lots of public outdoor activities.

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Now, I'm sorry?

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Sounds like a great thing.

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Yes, well, now, um not everyone, uh not all Chicagoans, we might imagine, were supportive

of this or thought this was a good idea, right?

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Not all were in favor of seeing Puerto Ricans celebrating out in the streets and such.

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And certainly, um the police, who already had hostile relations with many of the young men

in the community, um were not too pleased.

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As people gathered out in the street, this was on the last night of the week long

celebrations, um police started to come around and harassing young men and began chasing

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two young men down an alley.

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They opened fire on and shot a young man named Arcelis Cruz.

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When residents out on the street saw what had happened and the police of course claimed

self-defense, they said that Cruz was pulling out a gun.

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which others contested and said, no, it was a comb.

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And this, by the way, was often the defense that police officers used.

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They would say, the suspect was pulling out a weapon.

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um Whether or not that was true is up for question.

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um In any case, when uh witnesses saw what the police had done and that Cruz had been

shot, was bleeding there on the street, they started to gather and protest the police.

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So uh this first uprising in June of 1966 in Chicago was uh an expression of the

frustration of local residents with the harassment, the brutality, the abuse that many had

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experienced firsthand or witnessed uh by police against their community.

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Now, very importantly, and I'm not sure to what extent this was the case in other cities,

but I'm sure it was there as well.

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there was a priest in the community, Father Don Headley, who was there, observed and

witnessed, this was three days of, uh you know, what people would call rioting or, you

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know, uh public protest, the community in a standoff against uh law enforcement.

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He noted that some of the biggest troublemakers in the community, the guys who were trying

to incite violence and encouraging the crowds to

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you know, knock over, turn over police cars and such, that they were police officers

themselves.

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They were law enforcement who essentially were undercover and were trying to um

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uh promote this violence and basically stir up the trouble.

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So I think we have to look with some critical eyes, look at these cases with complexity to

understand what exactly was happening, what these dynamics were.

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Yes, certainly there were people in the community who were uh

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vocally protesting against law enforcement who were angry and upset with the abuse and the

harassment that they experienced.

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uh Yes, there were young people who probably were engaged in, um you know, illegal

activities, who were being violent and such.

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But I think there's a lot of evidence also that many of these urban um disturbances in

this period were being fueled by infiltrators and provocateurs.

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who were trying to make um these situations worse.

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This is the problem, right?

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When you have such gross, like systemic inequality is that it empowers people who want to

be violent uh for prejudicial reasons to do so and do so without repercussions as well.

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Because I imagine in that time it was a lose-lose for Puerto Ricans and for any minority

community, because if they don't defend themselves, they get hurt or killed.

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And if they do, then they're corroborating exactly why they should be hated in the first

place, right?

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Right, and there was just such a ready vocabulary for treating these incidents as unruly

people who were not law abiding, who were not interested in the rules of middle class

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society.

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um So talking about, and we see a lot of the same um kind of discursive.

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tools used in talking today about um episodes of unrest or protest.

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um And we'll get too deep into that now, know, oftentimes, you know, just kind of calling

it or the ways these uh incidents of protest, I mean, because most often they were

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This was a way, this was a kind of unplanned version of protest, often following months or

years of other kinds of protest and negotiation and efforts to uh advocate for these

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communities that felt uh over policed and targeted by police violence.

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And, you know, simply dismissing them as looters or uh unruly youth, violent youth was

such a familiar narrative to a lot of white and middle-class Americans uh that it just, uh

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it was the sort of the description of first resort when an episode like this happened.

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And I'd like to describe the

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first major large-scale Puerto Rican riot that happened in New York City in 1967, almost

exactly a year after the riot in Chicago.

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And interestingly, it came not long after the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which was something

that was an event and a celebration that had been created by members of the community.

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over well over a decade before.

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uh But even more interesting, I think, is that this riot came about six weeks after a

major conference that had been convened by a group, a large group and heterogeneous group

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of Puerto Rican leaders, community leaders, labor leaders.

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who met with members of the mayor's cabinet and other city officials to talk about just

the whole range of problems that were confronting the Puerto Rican community.

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um was, you know, deindustrialization was accelerating after the mid-60s.

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um And I, one other aspect of the kind of background frustrations that I wanted to

highlight here

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in both the Chicago riot, Latino riot and in the Puerto Rican riot in New York, is that

the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a real transformative or it was a moment when there was

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perceived to be transformative potential for black and brown communities.

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supported by the federal government, supported now by congressional law uh that prohibited

discrimination, prohibited discrimination in educational settings, in m employment.

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uh Later, the 1968 Housing Act would extend that into housing.

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um And after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, uh President Johnson issued an executive order

that specified um

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the requirement that employers uh take what he phrased, and this phrase had been used

before, but not as familiarly as now, had um President Johnson's executive order specified

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that employers take affirmative action to ensure um not just an absence of prejudice, to

promote equality in their workplaces.

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And so there was this kind of

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simultaneous dynamic of increased optimism and expectations because the federal government

was taking actions it had never before taken, you know, to extend the kind of slow rollout

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of the fight against, well, I'm sorry, to extend the slow acknowledgement of uh racial

equality that

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began formally in the courts with Brown v.

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Board of Ed in 1954.

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So 10 years later, this sweeping legislation

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laid the groundwork for a far more extensive uh

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fulfillment of the goals of equality.

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And yet at the same time, the socioeconomic conditions of a lot of black and brown

communities in the mid 1960s were getting worse.

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And I won't try to kind of capture or describe the whole range of um the shift in the

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African American civil rights movement because that has its own kind of complex and very

important history.

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But in Latino communities, there were similar kinds of um hopes and expectations that

were.

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becoming more difficult to sustain and people were becoming increasingly frustrated and

angry.

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And, okay, back again to the behavior of police, there's this kind of rhetoric and kind of

public discussions about equality in the mid-1960s and things are only getting worse in a

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lot of...

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Puerto Rican and Mexican-American communities or mixed Latino and uh Black communities.

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And so that's kind of the broad context for these moments of explosion.

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And so what happened in New York in 1967, a little less than a year after the riot in

Chicago, was a very similar incident.

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A young Puerto Rican man was shot to death by an off-duty police officer.

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And he said that the young man had been wielding a knife.

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Street protests turned into full-blown riot.

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I mean, first there was protest and then it became riots and they also extended across

about three days.

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In the New York case, I mean, as I explained, there had been this effort less than two

months earlier uh for collaboration among Puerto Rican community labor leaders m and

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the...

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mayor's office, Mayor John Lindsay, was known as uh a, uh not just a liberal Democrat, but

as a kind of social progressive.

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And so he tried to address the police and kind of rein them in.

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He ordered the police not to shoot at rioters, which I think he understood was a

possibility and without any firm leadership.

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probably would have happened in many instances as it was.

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There were two people killed during the riot by police, but of course the police denied

responsibility for those shootings.

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It was later proven by ballistics evidence.

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And so by 1960s standards, this

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riot was relatively contained, but still there were multiple lives lost.

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mean, tons of, um you know, people's communities were destroyed and, you know, outside

observers might say, well, they did it themselves.

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um But this was a kind of, uh you know, communities reaching a breaking point.

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Yeah.

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And I guess just to sort of clarify what we've been talking about, the purpose of these

rights, or I guess the reason why they happened, it self-defense?

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Was it protest?

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Was it activism?

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Or was it just this sort of built-up frustration that manifested in violence?

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would say, oh, can I go ahead Lauren?

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Yeah, I would say some of it was spontaneous protest.

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It really was frustration with some pretty unbearable conditions.

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Now one other thing to provide some context here, because I certainly don't want to

oversimplify this and say that all the police um were bad and all of the residents were

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good and innocent, right?

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The reality is, however,

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If you look at the press in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, there were dozens of stories

about police corruption.

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Police would shake down organized criminals.

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Police were robbing butcher stores, butchers and stealing thousands of dollars of meat.

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Police were engaged in all sorts of corruption at this time.

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So,

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It's no surprise then that they were carrying that bad behavior into these working class

Latino neighborhoods as well.

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there's plenty of evidence of police shootings of Puerto Rican and Mexican American men,

of killing of them in fact.

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The Latino community was not killing law enforcement officers in high numbers.

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It's the other way around.

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Or torturing them.

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You might recall also, Liam, your audience might um recognize that Chicago was also the

site of the notorious John Birch, a police captain, I believe he was, who only in the

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2000s was revealed that he had carried out this decades-long systematic torture, primarily

of black men in the city of Chicago.

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And there have been lawsuits with millions of dollars in damages awarded by the courts um

because of this.

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So, you know, the reality is that a lot of the police system, a lot of law enforcement was

in fact very corrupt.

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uh And that's to say nothing of immigration enforcement when we speak specifically about

Mexican immigrants.

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In the 1970s especially, you know, at the time what was known as INS, Immigration and

Naturalization Services, INS officers, border patrol officers, would come into Mexican

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00:45:03,263 --> 00:45:06,664

areas looking for, trying to round up

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That I like what the president is calling for today, know, in harassing um immigrants who

they suspected weren't documented.

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um But, you know, to go back to your question about, um you know, what uh set off these

events, these incidents, oftentimes there were public celebrations, as Lauren described in

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New York, as uh happened in other cities around the country.

356

00:45:30,997 --> 00:45:32,526

357

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The Chicano moratorium, example, 1970, August 29th, 1970 in Los Angeles, was a peaceful

protest against the Vietnam War.

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Thousands of Mexican Americans had come out to express their support for the Vietnamese

people, to protest the fact that so many Mexican American young men were coming home in

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body bags, were dying in what they saw as the senseless war against the North Vietnamese.

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In that moment when thousands of people were gathered peacefully in a park, arrived,

police and county sheriffs, LAPD and county sheriffs, and opened fire.

361

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And in fact, they killed a very famous Mexican American journalist, Ruben Salazar.

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So unfortunately, these moments of public gatherings, of celebrations outdoors, moments

when the police started to

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you know, um open fire on festival goers or protesters, marchers, uh they often are what

exploded into what were often described as riots in the press and in the media, but I

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think um would more accurately be described as uprisings or protests in many cases.

365

00:46:56,385 --> 00:47:08,422

Yeah, from everything that you've sort of described there, strikes me that it just framing

it around this relationship, you know, between with law enforcement as well really

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highlights the the kind of unwinnable situation that, you know, I guess every minority

community was in in that they couldn't just peacefully ask for the law to be changed.

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couldn't just

368

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You know, they weren't being heard or listened to to begin with.

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And even when the law is changed, know, things like the Civil Rights Act, which was

unquestionably necessary and, you know, a positive step forward.

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doesn't make people less racist overnight.

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And so you've still got this fundamental issue of, you know, one word against another of,

you know, people turning a blind eye to what the white man does and, you know, laying down

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the law a lot harsher on what a minority group does.

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So it's, know,

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00:47:53,727 --> 00:48:03,771

The riot in that sense just felt like this almost inevitable consequence of decades of

discrimination that you've been describing.

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00:48:04,828 --> 00:48:06,908

would agree with that description.

376

00:48:06,908 --> 00:48:19,588

I I think that applies to both the Chicago riot in 66 and the New York riot in 67, as well

as all of these smaller incidents of, you know, celebration that turned into conflict with

377

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police or protest that turned into rioting with the kind of...

378

00:48:29,860 --> 00:48:34,582

interference of police and injection of police violence.

379

00:48:35,200 --> 00:48:51,739

One thing I want to emphasize here that we've, think Lily and I have both indicated, but

maybe haven't said explicitly is how frustrated many uh Latino leaders were in the 1960s

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with how little their own decades of advocacy and claims about uh

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their civil rights in the face of a history of discrimination, a history of racial

violence, how little that was acknowledged by white officials or in public discourse in

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general.

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00:49:15,512 --> 00:49:23,897

And just a couple of points to highlight, a couple of points of historical irony to

highlight this.

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The day after the Puerto Rican riot,

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00:49:29,954 --> 00:49:44,505

ended I think, think this was like the you one day after so right around the same time as

the riot in in July 1967 was when President Lyndon Johnson convened the National Advisory

386

00:49:44,505 --> 00:49:56,863

Commission on Civil Disorders which is commonly referred to as the Kerner Commission to

study civil unrest you know that had been like four years of three years of

387

00:49:57,757 --> 00:50:09,597

violence in US cities, mostly in black neighborhoods by that point, but now by this point,

there were two major riots in Latino neighborhoods also.

388

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So Johnson convened that commission one day after this riot in Puerto Rican East Harlem

ended.

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And when the Kerner Commission published its 300 page report in 1968,

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Latinos were mentioned three times in 300 pages and like in passing no acknowledgement

that the conditions and this is I mean So I mean the kind of the idea of the ghetto

391

00:50:47,522 --> 00:50:56,948

conditions I mean that was the term that was used so often m in the 60s in particular uh

Was mostly understood to be like in

392

00:50:57,476 --> 00:51:00,917

cities like, you know, New York, Chicago, LA.

393

00:51:00,917 --> 00:51:16,361

But the fact is, Mexican Americans who were in many localities in the West, they were the

plurality, if not sometimes the majority of the population, those conditions uh were as

394

00:51:16,361 --> 00:51:27,384

present and as defining of people's lives as were the quote unquote ghetto conditions for

Black Americans that were

395

00:51:27,448 --> 00:51:30,730

studied by members of the current Kerner Commission.

396

00:51:30,730 --> 00:51:52,239

so this kind of sense of enormous frustration with invisibility and just having like

decades of organizing efforts be silenced was something that just was so, it was so

397

00:51:52,239 --> 00:51:55,040

ironically and painfully obvious to

398

00:51:55,511 --> 00:51:58,007

many Latinos at this point in time.

399

00:51:58,007 --> 00:52:03,561

um In fact, a few weeks after the

400

00:52:05,968 --> 00:52:18,053

the riot in Puerto Rican New York, there was a feature in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine

titled A Minority Nobody Knows.

401

00:52:18,053 --> 00:52:26,597

And it was about Mexican Americans who are referred to as the long neglected minority that

was quote, beginning to stir.

402

00:52:26,697 --> 00:52:28,828

But it only talked about farm workers.

403

00:52:28,828 --> 00:52:34,350

This was sort of like addressing the early farm workers movement.

404

00:52:34,684 --> 00:52:39,164

that would become much more visible by 1968, 69, 70.

405

00:52:39,164 --> 00:52:54,698

um And the point here is that so the minority nobody knows is still, I mean, you know,

even journalists who thought they were kind of shining a light on this story understood

406

00:52:54,698 --> 00:53:04,444

not, it just did not understand the scope of the issue and had no concept of the depth of

407

00:53:04,908 --> 00:53:16,201

effort and um organizing that had been happening in both Mexican American and Puerto Rican

communities since the early 20th century.

408

00:53:16,201 --> 00:53:25,654

you know, since the 1920s was the first civil rights organizations organized by Mexican

Americans in the West, um etc.

409

00:53:25,654 --> 00:53:32,493

So I just wanted to highlight that um confounding invisibility

410

00:53:32,493 --> 00:53:33,131

Yeah.

411

00:53:33,131 --> 00:53:43,201

was happening simultaneously with the kind of, you know, in cities like Chicago and New

York, the targeting of Latinos by police.

412

00:53:43,201 --> 00:53:59,258

Yeah, and I guess, you know, to that point and to try and bring this to some sort of uh

close, do you think, how did life really change after the riots, if at all, for Puerto

413

00:53:59,258 --> 00:54:00,959

Rican communities?

414

00:54:04,846 --> 00:54:12,693

would say for some, yeah, I would say for some, mean, local governments had to respond in

some way, you know, positively.

415

00:54:12,693 --> 00:54:24,523

So in some cases, you know, um municipalities opened up more um employment for Puerto

Ricans who, you know, by the way, are U.S.

416

00:54:24,523 --> 00:54:32,854

citizens, and so they, you know, would qualify for, you know, social service positions,

for growing numbers of slots in

417

00:54:32,854 --> 00:54:36,536

local police departments and other kinds of public facing agencies.

418

00:54:36,536 --> 00:54:45,760

um So there was a possibility for uh the middle class to expand somewhat in that period.

419

00:54:45,760 --> 00:54:59,726

um As people were able to move out of these uh poor districts, also they were able to

improve their living conditions.

420

00:54:59,726 --> 00:55:01,286

421

00:55:01,344 --> 00:55:06,418

Yeah, and that's one point I wanted to go back to actually, Liam, if that's okay.

422

00:55:06,558 --> 00:55:13,003

You had asked in the show notes about was the city in decline or was it on the up at this

time?

423

00:55:13,324 --> 00:55:20,169

One thing I think that's important for us to note is that most American cities by the

middle of the 20th century were pretty aged.

424

00:55:20,169 --> 00:55:23,251

You know, they were at least 100 years old or so.

425

00:55:23,252 --> 00:55:24,743

infrastructure was declining.

426

00:55:24,743 --> 00:55:27,095

Remember, the suburbs were booming.

427

00:55:27,095 --> 00:55:30,872

So anybody who could, who were generally white middle class folks,

428

00:55:30,872 --> 00:55:35,906

who if they could afford to buy, move out and buy brand new housing in the suburbs, many

did.

429

00:55:35,906 --> 00:55:40,730

And so those who were left in the inner cities were the people who had the fewest

resources and means.

430

00:55:40,730 --> 00:55:55,674

um And it became very easy at this time when um other white residents are seeing the

cities in decline and their decayed and the services are um not good.

431

00:55:55,674 --> 00:56:07,742

and recall also that manufacturing is beginning to decline also the jobs are leaving a lot

of the urban northeast the midwest then it's very easy to point the finger at and to blame

432

00:56:07,742 --> 00:56:21,682

the newest arrivals the most recent newcomers southern african-americans who migrated

north uh puerto rican's and mexicans but as a result of the protests i would say um

433

00:56:21,682 --> 00:56:30,471

and the demands for greater equality, civil rights and such, there were some gains that

both Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans enjoyed.

434

00:56:32,033 --> 00:56:40,173

But that doesn't mean, as Lauren suggested earlier, that people's minds changed overnight

and that racism was eliminated necessarily.

435

00:56:40,173 --> 00:56:40,800

Hmm.

436

00:56:40,800 --> 00:56:53,334

I think one really important thing that came out of, mean, to a degree, these two riots

specifically, but more generally that came out of the experience of kind of almost

437

00:56:53,334 --> 00:57:01,420

continuous protests that was going on for like five years, basically between 1966 and at

least 1971.

438

00:57:01,420 --> 00:57:04,847

um And then, you know, still continued beyond.

439

00:57:04,847 --> 00:57:09,338

um But was the sense that this is how

440

00:57:09,338 --> 00:57:10,808

you make your voice heard.

441

00:57:10,808 --> 00:57:22,251

And the young people who were largely like second generation Mexican-American or second

generation Puerto Rican, they've been born in the US.

442

00:57:22,332 --> 00:57:34,955

They'd watched their parents struggle and kind of fail and increasingly through the late

60s and into the 70s kind of failed to achieve the economic security that seemed on offer

443

00:57:34,955 --> 00:57:38,496

in these American cities.

444

00:57:38,829 --> 00:57:55,541

And so, you know, young people were really um galvanized and motivated and um seeking

increasingly to use education as a tool to help themselves get out of, you know, poverty

445

00:57:55,541 --> 00:57:58,403

conditions, ghetto neighborhoods.

446

00:57:58,484 --> 00:58:04,762

And this is another actually connection to um the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

447

00:58:04,762 --> 00:58:18,341

within a couple of years, colleges and universities began really trying, getting really

creative with trying to create access for black and brown students.

448

00:58:18,341 --> 00:58:26,207

And this was a kind of accelerator of youth activism and student movements.

449

00:58:26,207 --> 00:58:33,952

And of course there were, you know, student movements happening in other parts of society,

you know, like the white, mostly white.

450

00:58:34,422 --> 00:58:40,718

left and sort of left leaning college students, the anti-war movement, et cetera.

451

00:58:40,718 --> 00:58:48,044

And so um one, I would say like you could draw a line.

452

00:58:48,044 --> 00:59:02,896

It's not totally direct and you know, the kind of causal relationships here are um

multifaceted, not simple, but between these intensive years of protest,

453

00:59:03,080 --> 00:59:17,502

and the kind of activism that led to, for instance, the Mexican-American and other Latino

defense of affirmative action policies when they came under assault by the early to

454

00:59:17,502 --> 00:59:19,893

mid-1970s.

455

00:59:19,974 --> 00:59:25,698

And in fact, I've also recently published an article about this too.

456

00:59:27,740 --> 00:59:33,785

case that is best known as the test case for affirmative action in higher education in the

United States.

457

00:59:33,785 --> 00:59:39,920

This was the Bakke versus Regents of University California, 1977.

458

00:59:41,360 --> 00:59:53,393

That the kind of first wave of organizing and protest against the um the state, the

district court level decision in California.

459

00:59:53,393 --> 01:00:02,119

that came from Mexican Americans, Mexican American students, Mexican American faculty, and

then it quickly sort of galvanized Latinos all across the United States.

460

01:00:02,119 --> 01:00:15,867

Of course, there were African Americans who were, law professors and law students and

others who were working on this also and advocating for the maintaining of affirmative

461

01:00:15,867 --> 01:00:16,788

action.

462

01:00:16,928 --> 01:00:23,372

But again, this was an instance of the Latino participation in a really important civil

rights issue.

463

01:00:23,816 --> 01:00:30,682

not making it into the standard narrative of what happened in this civil rights era.

464

01:00:30,682 --> 01:00:48,715

So I just want to sort of highlight that as a uh follow on of the intensive period of

riots and also as a kind of echo of the uh invisibility that Latinos have.

465

01:00:48,715 --> 01:00:50,196

466

01:00:51,942 --> 01:00:56,283

fought against in US history.

467

01:00:56,577 --> 01:00:57,178

Yeah.

468

01:00:57,178 --> 01:00:57,558

Yeah.

469

01:00:57,558 --> 01:01:04,092

And I think, you on that note, you the two of you have probably set up the next 90

episodes of the podcast.

470

01:01:04,092 --> 01:01:08,225

There's so much to unpack from everything we've just discussed.

471

01:01:08,305 --> 01:01:13,439

And I realize we've only just really started to have the conversation that needs to be had

around this.

472

01:01:13,439 --> 01:01:20,894

But it's been a fascinating insight that is absolutely going to lead to many more

discussions on the podcast about this.

473

01:01:20,894 --> 01:01:24,396

And I can't thank you both enough for joining me.

474

01:01:25,281 --> 01:01:32,067

for anyone listening to the podcast that wants to learn more, I'm going to put links to

everything that we've mentioned in the show notes.

475

01:01:32,067 --> 01:01:34,537

So go and check all of that out.

476

01:01:34,537 --> 01:01:38,744

But if anyone wants to connect with either of you directly, where can they do that?

477

01:01:38,744 --> 01:01:39,625

Lauren.

478

01:01:40,892 --> 01:01:45,687

um I'm actually not on social media, but someone can email me at my Rutgers address.

479

01:01:45,687 --> 01:01:49,561

You just Google me at Rutgers and get my email address.

480

01:01:49,561 --> 01:01:52,564

I'd be delighted to correspond with anyone who's interested.

481

01:01:52,865 --> 01:01:53,872

Wonderful.

482

01:01:54,691 --> 01:02:03,466

not on social media so people can find me on UIC History Department's website and feel

free to reach out to me that way.

483

01:02:03,903 --> 01:02:04,973

Excellent.

484

01:02:05,274 --> 01:02:10,146

I am still kind of on social media, very tentatively on Blue Sky and LinkedIn.

485

01:02:10,146 --> 01:02:12,056

So search for my name and I'll pop up somewhere.

486

01:02:12,056 --> 01:02:21,830

And if any of you listening enjoy the podcast, please do remember as well to give us a

rating and a review wherever you are listening to this and give us a follow as well,

487

01:02:21,830 --> 01:02:24,862

because then all future episodes will just appear in your feed.

488

01:02:24,862 --> 01:02:30,064

And if you really like what we do and you want to support the show, you can do from as

little as one dollar.

489

01:02:30,064 --> 01:02:32,505

All the info is in the show notes for that.

490

01:02:33,441 --> 01:02:36,652

Thank you again to Lauren and Lillia for joining me for this.

491

01:02:36,652 --> 01:02:39,901

And thank you all so much for listening and goodbye.