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SVTC HOME > NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE
SVTC Action Archive 
Spring 2000
Earth Day: A Chicana Perspective
by Corina Vera
This edition of our newsletter is a special focus on Earth Day. I was asked to write an article for the newsletter and quickly realized that Earth Day was not on my radar screen and that perhaps that it had never been. I asked myself why. I realized that the social justice tradition that I was raised in was focused on social justice issues in the Chicano/Mexican-American community and then the larger Bay Area Latino community. The only activity that could be even remotely linked to “environmentalism” in the Chicano community was the United Farm Workers’ anti-pesticide campaigns. However, these campaigns were and have been specifically focused on worker health issues. I decided that in order to understand why, for the most part, Earth Day is not on the map for Chicanos that I needed to explain what was happening for Chicanos thirty years ago and that the same issues are still on the agenda 30 years later.
Thus, the first Earth Day (1970) was very different in the Chicano/Mexican-American community:
Diana Palacios was selected head cheerleader of the Crystal City, Texas high school squad. You may ask yourselves, AND what has that got to do with anything? The previous year, Diana Palacios challenged a ruling of the high school that allowed only one Mexican American to be chosen for the cheerleading squad. When her petition was rejected, more than 1,700 high school students walked out of classes on December 9th to demand Mexican-American cheerleaders, teachers, counselors, and representation in curriculum.
Led by John Giumarra Jr., grape growers in Delano, California, signed three-year contracts with the United Farm Workers (UFW) after two contentious years of negotiations.
A National Chicano Moratorium civil rights’ protest in Laguna Park attracted 30,000 people. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and Albert Gurule were prevented from speaking and were arrested on charges of robbery and carrying a concealed weapon. (They were later acquitted). Police used clubs and tear gas to break up the peaceful demonstration. As a result of police over-reaction, journalist Ruben Salazar, the news director for KMEX and a columnist for the LA Times, was killed when a tear-gas missile is fired into the Silver Dollar Bar.
Cesar Chavez was jailed when he refused to call off a lettuce boycott. He was released on December 22, pending an appeal to the California Supreme Court.
The Vietnam War was still in full swing in 1970 and didn’t end until 1975. Meanwhile, approximately 80,000 Latinos served in the War. The last soldier to leave Vietnam was a Latino, Master Sergeant Juan J. Valdez. As one Department of Defense document states, this fact “gave credence to the Hispanic theme of participation in America’s war: `First in, last to leave.’” Although the Latino population in 1970 was approximately only 5% of all Americans or 9.1 million (of which 2.5% presumably were males), over a third of those fighting on the front lines were Latinos.
In terms of income and poverty rates, no figures are readily available for 1970, but in 1990 the median family income for Latinos was $25,064, while it was $35,225 for Anglo-Americans. Over 1 million Latino families lived in poverty in 1990. Specifically, it was 23.4% for Mexican families, and less than 10% for non-Hispanic families. These indicators are dramatic!
My point is that the Chicano/Mexican American population in 1970 was concerned with issues of equity in education, employment, living conditions, and having a voice in the political process. We were attempting to move from basic subsistence to the insistence that we be treated equitably. Our soldiers were over represented in Vietnam, but we, as well as other communities of color, were not privy to the same privileges that the majority population enjoyed. It is my contention that the problems in our community were so overwhelming, that the “conservation ethic,” if you will, of Earth Day was just not salient. Later, the Latino community became aware that environmental racism also was a problem that had to be confronted. The political agenda in some communities expanded to include the environment.
It is the marriage of 1960’s civil rights movements in communities of color and issues of the environment that has created a more holistic approach to the problems of all species. It is a model that I saw a glimpse of in Seattle with the marriage of labor and environment. One example is the Teamster-Turtle alliance. Now let’s join labor, environmentalists and communities of color to really make things happen. Dolores Huerta, a co-founder of the UFW and leader in the Latino community, has a perspective on organizing that is much quoted and yet always relevant. Maybe, Earth Day 2001 can launch the idea of a truly unified organizing movement.
Corina Vera is SVTC’s Community Health Project Oranizer
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