Content area
Full text
On August 30, 1972, a small group of young Chicano and Chicana activists invaded Catalina Island. The action was part of what they called la Marcha de la Reconquista, a three-month-long "March of the Reconquest" aimed at drawing attention to discrimination against Mexican Americans and at protesting what organizers said was the U.S. government's illegal takeover of Mexican land in 1848. Dressed in combat boots, khaki uniforms, and their signature headwear, these Brown Berets traveled twentysix miles from the Los Angeles shore, raised a Mexican flag over the Avalon harbor, and reclaimed the popular tourist destination for Mexico. Local authorities initially allowed the militant group to stay, but after two weeks they decided they had had enough. On September 12 the police issued an order to leave the island, and the Berets complied. The Chicano invasion of Catalina was over.1
This largely forgotten moment in the history of Chicano/a activism is striking in that it captures something of the ambiguous position that Mexican Americans have long occupied within the imaginary of the United States, the uncertain "third space" of a population at once not-quite-native and not-quitealien. Ascending the hillside in their military garb, the young radicals looked the part of Cuban-style invaders, and yet they gestured toward a time when the United States was the aggressor. Just as striking, though, is what the Catalina invasion reveals about the inadequacies of the mass media and of the network news in particular during a period celebrated by many as the "Golden Age" of television. In the first decades after World War II the networks earned a reputation for quality journalism, particularly for their bold coverage of the black civil rights movement.2 Yet they rarely reported on the Mexican American civil rights movement occurring simultaneously, and when they did cover events, it was often through a very narrow filter in which Chicanos and Chicanas were framed as threats to the integrity of the nation. Newsmakers ignored major stories such as the 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, among others.3 Yet the Catalina story-a minor episode in the chronology of the Chicano movement by any measure-appeared on the August 31, 1972, edition of the CBS Evening News. In its framing of the incident, CBS tapped into viewers' fear...