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The San franciSco bay area iS perhapS one of the geographieS MoSt powerfully shaped by the activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Oakland, in particular, is a city etched by the political activism of the past, especially the civil rights movement and Black Panther mobilizations (Clay 2012; Miranda 2003; Self 2003). This activism is memorialized through the popular and academic construction of Oakland as a city of Black protest movements and a place of radical mobilizations. The imagery of this activism rests on a characterization of these movements as mass, grand-scale revolutionary attempts to remake US society, and therefore the spotlight remains on the most visible forms of mobilizing: street protests, sit-ins, boycotts, and the celebration of its most vocal leaders. As Andreana Clay (2012) argues, the legacies of this past activism continue to shape how people experience the city and how new generations of youth come to perceive themselves as activists.
The memorialization of Oakland as a site of Black protest has produced a historical amnesia about the city's Chicano/Latino mobilizations. We know little about how Mexican Americans historically mobilized in the city or where they have predominantly lived. Amid Oakland's historical Black and white spatial order lays Oakland's Latino neighborhood of Fruitvale, located in the city's more impoverished sections called its flatlands. It is the area in Oakland with the largest Latino population and a region, as this essay reveals, where the Chicano movement forged a broad base of support. Here Chicano movement activists experimented with the creation of community-based organizations that enlisted community members in projects of neighborhood improvement. The product of this activism included institutions such as legal centers, health clinics, and cultural organizations, many of which still stand today. The legacies of this activism continue to shape the neighborhood: from the murals on the streets to the architectural design of the neighborhood restaurants and shops, it is a region that has come to signal Chicano and Latino identity and an epicenter of present-day immigrant rights organizing.
In this essay I demonstrate how Chicano movement activists drew attention to the historical role they played in changing conditions in Oakland. In their recollections of the past, activists constructed a politics of activism, race, and social movement struggle forged through productions of space....