40th Anniversary of La Raza Unida

Today’s guest blog is from Carlos Muñoz, Jr., professor emeritus of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was one of the founders of La Raza Unida Party in California and is the award-winning author of Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement.

La Raza Unida button

Mexican Americans made political history 40 years ago when, on January 17, 1970, they founded their own independent political party in Crystal City, Texas. They called it La Raza Unida Party – or, translated, “The United People’s Party.”

A look back at this party can give us clues about where we need to go today.

The call for an independent political party came out of a national 1969 radical Chicano youth conference held in Denver, Colorado, by the Crusade for Justice, the first Mexican American civil rights organization to emerge during the ’60s. The conference produced a plan for Chicano liberation called “El Plan de Aztlan.” The document called the two-party political system “the same animal with two heads that feed at the same trough” because they represented the nation’s racist political power structures that historically had oppressed and colonized Mexican Americans since the end of the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848.

As was the case for African Americans in the South, Mexican Americans had been victimized by white supremacy in the Southwest – from lynchings to segregation.

The party’s strength was in Texas and California, the two states with the largest Mexican American populations. With the exception of Crystal City, where the party gained control of the city council and school board, and several other South Texas cities, there were few victories for the party, due to strong opposition from both conservative and liberal white and Mexican American sectors.

For example, Henry Gonzalez, a liberal Democratic Congressman and the only Mexican American from Texas serving in the U.S. Congress at the time, publicly denounced Jose Angel Gutierrez, the leader of the party.

Ricardo Romo ran for governor with the Peace and Freedom Party in 1970.

In California, the party was not able to get the required 66,000 voters registered to get on the state ballot. It was able to register only 22,000 people, mostly college students. It never came close to a single political victory. [Activists included 1970 Peace and Freedom Party gubernatorial candidate Ricardo Romo.]

The party’s last hurrah came in the 1972 Texas governor’s race when its candidate, Ramsey Muñiz, received 6.43% of the votes. Soon after, the party started to decline due to ideological divisions.

The party did not meet it’s goal of becoming a viable independent political institution, but it did  contribute to the opening of the doors for Mexican Americans into the two-party political system. After the party’s decline, many of the party’s activists went into the Democratic Party.

More significantly, the party contributed to the political awakening of the Mexican American people and other Latinos. It put the issue of political representation of Latino/as  on the agendas of local, state and national politics. Prior to the emergence of the party, there were only a relative handful of Mexican American and Latino/a elected officials. Now, though still underrepresented, there are hundreds of them throughout nation.  For example, in 1970 there were 5 Latinos in the U.S. Congress.  Now there are 25, including two U.S. Senators.

The increase in elected officials, however, has not resulted in fundamental change for Mexican Americans. Primarily because those officials, no matter how liberal they may be, are an integral part of the “animal with two heads.” Racial or ethnic identity does not guarantee the representation of communities of color – specifically, those who are poor and working class. The best example today is the President of the United States. The majority of African American and Latino/as voted for Obama expecting he would act in the interest of their communities. He has not.

The story of the La Raza Unida Party teaches us that independent political parties based on racial or ethnic identity will not work. An independent mass political party that can represent the needs of our more complex diverse society must emerge to challenge the two-party dictatorship. Such a party could lead to an authentic multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural democracy for the twenty-first century.

Note: For more information on this third party, see Armando Navarro’s La Raza Unida Party: A Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship. There are also archival materials on the party in Texas for those who want to review some of the original documents.

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