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A history revisited

Metro students re-examine Chicano past

By Svetlana Guineva
guineva@mscd.edu

Every year on Sept. 15, the celebration of Hispanic heritage and culture begins.

As with any other racial or ethnic group, the activities send out to the world a simple message: If you want progressive change and growth, roll up your sleeves and immerse yourself in the arduous task of self-determination. Through knowledge, find out who you are and where are you coming from, and be proud of it.

One way to do this is to turn back to history and fill in the blanks.

A Metro group called Los Herederos of Change and Esperanza (the Heirs of Change and Hope) has taken it upon its shoulders to cross and look beyond long-established borders and limitations, including challenging the curriculum of Chicano Studies.

"We have inherited a new type of struggle," said Daniel Salcido, president of Los Herederos and a Metro student. "It is our responsibility to learn from the past and apply the knowledge in agreement with today's changes."

Part of Los Herederos' efforts to expose social struggle in its various forms has been the facilitating of a wide range of speakers. They invited local and national heroes, who have been a part of revolutionary movements at one time or another.

In their own revolutionary way, the academic club has challenged the curriculum of Chicano Studies at Metro for leaving out the voices of the Chicano community in Colorado. The students started the Beyond Chicanismo Oral History Project, meant to fill in the blanks of Colorado's Chicano history.

"The idea behind this project is to show that the students, instead of being consumers, are producing their own knowledge," Salcido said. "All of us should be viewed as changing agents, not as passive, adapted observers."

It all began several years ago in one of Metro chicano studies professor Nick Morales' classes. Using traditional textbooks in class, Morales couldn't answer the question posed by some of his students as to why there was so little written about the Chicano experience in Colorado. The textbooks extensively examined California and Texas, but nothing on a local level.

Several enthusiasts got together and, under Morales' supervision and academic expertise, began conducting interviews with local Chicano activists. At the same time, they were doing research of what had gone on decades ago during the peak of the Chicano struggle for self-determination.

After 95 videotapes of interviews and hundreds of research hours, the students produced two books, now supplemental of the Chicano Studies texts throughout the state.

The first book called "The Symbols of Resistance" goes deeper than the established norms to re-evaluate the murder of a Colorado Movimiento leader Ricardo Falcon, the 1974 mysterious death of six Boulder students known as the Los Seis de Boulder, and the death of Luis "Junior" Martinez, shot by the Denver police.

The book came alive because almost nothing is written about these people. They are some of the blank spots, said Morales, the Chicano Studies professor who monitored the academic content in the book.

But Morales and the students also encountered an interesting phenomenon. Many people in the Chicano community, where part of the research was done, were reluctant to discuss any further what happened decades ago.

"They (would) protest how the story isn't told, but then, wouldn't want to talk about it," Morales said.

He understood that part of the problem was the title of the project - "Beyond Chicanismo." Morales found out that family members and comrades of Chicano activists would see a departure from the real values of the movement and what the revolutionaries involved in it fought for.

"But 'beyond' means to open new doors," Morales said and added, that for any ethic group to be stuck in blind nationalism, there was a risk of misinterpretation of what the real objectives were.

Another problem appeared to be that members of the community accepted the project as a way to criticize the activists' struggle for social justice and some of the methods they used, Morales said. People thought that by exposing more facts about the Movimiento leaders, that would make them less heroic, as if the students were trying to "shrink the memories of the heroes," he said. But also, the diversity of the activism has to be remembered-white radicals, activists from New Afrika movement and activists from Puerto Rico were also part of the Chicano struggle for self-determination, he said.

"Some people in the community feared the revision of history, thinking that we (were) not being fair to the legacy of those heroes," Morales said. This becomes an issue when it comes to discussing the more militant wing of the movement that used different tactics, he said.

But these heroes, no matter how they died, were the true symbols of resistance, Morales said, and it is worth examining how they lived, not how they died.

Precisely for that reason, the students thought of the "Beyond Chicanismo" project as a conscious journey, Salcido said.

"'Beyond Chicanismo' is a radical pedagogical project," he said. "It is an attempt to move beyond certain cultural and nationalistic ideas; not to ignore them, but to reach out to other communities working for social justice."

And following his zest for learning about new and interesting subjects, Metro senior Dave Mason got involved in the second book the students produced-"The Struggle for La Sierra." The book talks about the four-decades-long battle of Chicano residents in the San Luis Land Grant in Colorado to recover their rights over the land dating back to the 1800s.

Mason wrote an essay about the legal struggle of those people and enjoyed putting the book together.

Mason grew up outside Detroit and, being a "white boy," was mostly unaware of the Chicano Movement existence, he said.

"What was surprising to me was the low-intensity conflict that was going on for some time," Mason said. "I never really knew that Chicanos faced such racism."

Talking about the project, Mason said it is worthwhile for undergraduate students to participate in it because the benefits range from having to deal with oral history to good preparation for graduate studies and research.

"Oral history is the story that usually doesn't get told, the real nuts and bolts, the day-to-day life, the real human experience," he said. "The 'Beyond Chicanismo' project is an invaluable experience in trying to get the whole picture, regardless of your political views, color or perceptions."

"Beyond Chicanismo" is an ongoing project. The next research effort to grow into a book will be about the United Mexican-American Students organization, which started 35 years ago at the University of Colorado at Boulder.