Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice

Abstract

According to the 'common sense theory', these were common facts and caused no disruption in the scripted judicial racial order of the moment. [...]in Part Three Haney López returns to the roots of the Chicano Movement and analyzes the new racial ideology of the late 1960s, aimed at dismantling the insidious 'common racial order' accepted at the time. Chapter 7 traces the relationship between the Chicano and the Black Power Movement as a determinant factor in the development of a non-white Chicano racial identity; the racial dilemmas among Mexican American generations, whose sense of belonging to the ideals of white assimilation were challenged by the younger generation; and the interconnection of Chicano protest, legal repression and racial identity.

Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice, by Ian F. Haney López. Harvard University Press, 2003.

In Racism on Trial: the Chicano Fight for Justice, Haney López provides a critical account of the inherent challenges that the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles underwent in the late 1960s to embrace 'the brown race' while defying the prevailing U.S. white and non-white racial dichotomy. Haney López's aims are threefold and clearly stated from the beginning (p. 2). The book addresses the formation of a non-white identity among Mexicans in East Los Angeles during the Chicano Movement, analyzes the powerful role of legal violence in the creation of racial thinking, and establishes a new theory of race relations or 'common sense racism' whose dynamics is extensible to twenty-first century U.S. racial relations.

The book consists of three parts and a final epilogue. Each part is devoted to each one of the three goals the author has indicated in the introduction. In addition, each part consists of three chapters that develop each of the organizing issues. In Part One, the author scrutinizes two well-known legal cases in the history of the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, the trials of the East Los Angeles Thirteen and the Biltmore Six, both legally represented by the contentious writer, activist, and lead attorney of the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, Oscar Zeta Acosta. Through the account of the East L.A. Thirteen trial, Haney López effectively reveals the roots of the Brown Berets' Movement, mobilized to fight against unequal educational treatment, poverty, urban isolationism, and police brutality. In his analysis of the Biltmore Six trial, he delves into the forces of racial discrimination within the U.S. justice system. As he clearly exposes, both trials proved the malleability of Chicanos as an underclass by U.S. institutions as well as the invisibility and subordinated position of Mexicans in the Southwest (p. 40). In Chapter 2, he specifically tackles the disparate views about Mexican identity that judges held in the late 60s, when Mexicans and, even less, Chicanos were not recognized as a distinct racial group, the main reason being, as Haney López points out, that until 1968 the story of Mexican racialization had not yet been written. Chapter 3 is a comprehensive historical account of the construction of the Mexican race in East Los Angeles, dating back to the early 1800s when the Californios divided people along class and race lines, including the pobladores or Mexicanos from central Mexico.

In Part Two, Haney López explains the roots of legal violence against the Mexican community through his theory of 'common sense racism' (Chapter 5). As he argues, 'much of our behavior, including our racial beliefs and practices, depends on what we take to be common sense' (p. 109). That is, 'common sense expresses the intuitive notion that certain objects and actions are simply what they are, widely known, widely recognized, not needing any explanation' (p. 110). In this sense, it is common sense and not 'intentional racism' (p. 103) that Mexican judges were underrepresented in the 1960s and 1970s, that the Los Angeles Superior Court nominated its friends and neighbours, and that Mexicans were excluded from L.A. grand juries in the 1960s as Haney López illustrates in Chapter 4. According to the 'common sense theory', these were common facts and caused no disruption in the scripted judicial racial order of the moment. They were procedures to which people did not give any thought, as they were part of an accepted common sense racial ritual of white superiority and Mexican inferiority and criminalization (Chapter 6).

Finally, in Part Three Haney López returns to the roots of the Chicano Movement and analyzes the new racial ideology of the late 1960s, aimed at dismantling the insidious 'common racial order' accepted at the time. Chicano Movement protests turned to race and not to other group solidarity basis because, as Haney López argues, white superiority treated Mexicans as an inferior race that had no choice but to turn to 'a politics based on non-white identity' (p. 158). Chapter 7 traces the relationship between the Chicano and the Black Power Movement as a determinant factor in the development of a non-white Chicano racial identity; the racial dilemmas among Mexican American generations, whose sense of belonging to the ideals of white assimilation were challenged by the younger generation; and the interconnection of Chicano protest, legal repression and racial identity. Chapter 8 vividly captures the history of the Brown Berets - its ideology, activism, gender exclusion and its dissolution in 1972. Chapter 9 rigorously analyzes the Chicano's racial identity, as a non-white, anti-white, black solidarity axiom. Haney López discusses current issues within the Chicano Movement in the twenth-first century such as the conception of race as nation and the return to Aztlán; nationalism as a defining category of Chicano ideology; mestizaje as best describing the creation of the brown race; and the gendering of the Chicano race. He concludes that the pervasive influence of 'common sense racism' determined the remake of Mexican racial identity.

Haney López's aim to end the book with an epilogue that ties together the pre-vious chapters gives the reader an opportunity to reflect on what the legacy of Oscar Zeta Acosta and the Chicano Power Movement means today. In particular, he focuses on how legal violence continues to exist in U.S. courtrooms, not to mention the brutal shape it takes on the streets throughout the United States. The book offers a refreshing approach to the understanding of race relations in the United States. The analysis of the Chicano Movement and its response to the problem of race in the U.S. provocatively becomes essential to an understanding of the 'racial common sense' underlying legal violence and Anglo-Mexican relations in the Southwest.

References

References

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