Chicano Moratorium - Background

Background

The Chicano Moratorium was a movement of Chicano activists that organized anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and activities in Mexican American communities throughout the Southwest and elsewhere from November 1969 through August 1971. "Our struggle is not in Vietnam but in the movement for social justice at home" was a key slogan of the movement. It was coordinated by the National Chicano Moratorium Committee (NCMC) and led largely by activists from the Chicano student movement and the Brown Beret organization.

The march took place at Laguna Park (now Ruben F. Salazar Park)

The committee organized its first demonstration on December 20, 1969, in East Los Angeles, with over 1,000 participants. The groups won the early support of the Denver-based Crusade for Justice, led by Rodolfo Gonzales, also known as Corky Gonzales. A conference of anti-war and anti-draft Chicano and Latino activists from communities in the Southwest and the city of Chicago was held at the Crusade headquarters in early December 1969 and began developing plans for nationwide mobilizations to be presented to a national Chicano youth conference planned for late March 1970. On February 28, 1970, a second Chicano Moratorium demonstration was held again in East Los Angeles, with more than 3,000 demonstrators from throughout California participating, despite a driving rain. A documentary of that march was prepared by a Chicano program on the local public television station that the committee used nationally to popularize its efforts. At the March Chicano Youth Conference, held in Denver, Los Angeles Chicano Moratorium co-chair Rosalio Munoz presented a motion to hold a National Chicano Moratorium against the war on August 29, 1970. Local moratoriums were projected for cities throughout the Southwest and beyond, to build up for the national event on August 29.

More than 20 local protests were held in cities such as Houston, Albuquerque, Chicago, Denver, Fresno, San Francisco, San Diego, Oakland, Oxnard, San Fernando, San Pedro and Douglas, Arizona. Most had 1,000 or more participants. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 from around the nation, Mexico and Puerto Rico marched through East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970. The rally, however, was broken up by local police, who said that they had gotten reports that a nearby liquor store was being robbed. They chased the "suspects" into the park, and declared the gathering of thousands an illegal assembly. Monitors and activists resisted the attack, but eventually people were herded back to the march route, Whittier Boulevard. As protest organizer Rosalinda Montez Palacios recounts, "I was sitting on the lawn directly in front of the stage resting after a long and peaceful march when out of nowhere appeared a helicopter overhead and started dropping canisters of tear gas on the marchers as we were enjoying the program. We began to run for safety and as we breathed in the teargas, were blinded by it. Some of us made it to nearby homes where people started flusing their faces with water from garden hoses. Our eyes were burning and tearing and we choked as we tried to breath . The peaceful marchers could not believe what was happening and once we controlled the burning from our eyes, many decided to fight back." Stores went up in smoke, scores were injured, more than 150 arrested and four were killed, including Gustav Montag, Lyn Ward, José Diaz, and award-winning journalist Rubén Salazar, news director of the local Spanish television station and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. As the Chicano poet Alurista put it: "The police called it a people's riot; the people called it a police riot."

Gustav Montag, arguably, was perhaps the only person purposely killed during the confrontations. While it has been a subject of conjecture and debate as to whether or not Salazar was intentionally wounded, the Los Angeles Times described, in its front page article the next day, how several protesters faced police officers with drawn rifles at the end of an alley, shouting, and kept their ground, even when ordered to disperse. The article stated that Gustav was picking up pieces of broken concrete and aiming them at those officers, who opened fire. Gustav died on the scene from gunshot wounds. The police officers later claimed that they had aimed over his head in order to scare him off. A photo accompanied this article, showing Gustav's body being carried away by several brothers. What isn't generally known is that Gustav was not a Chicano, but a Sephardic Jew there to give support to the movement.

The continuous clashes with the police made mass mobilizations problematic, but the commitment to social change lasted. Many community leaders, politicians, clergy, businessmen, judges, teachers, and trade unionists participated in the many Chicano Moratoriums.

The best known historical fact of the Moratorium was the death of Salazar, known for his reporting on civil rights and police brutality. The official story is that Salazar was killed by a tear gas canister fired by a member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department into the Silver Dollar Café at the conclusion of the August 29 rally, leading some to claim that he had been targeted. While an inquest found that his death was a homicide, the deputy sheriff who fired the shell was not prosecuted.