Black-Brown Unity Now
Rodriguez, Luis J.
Writing to America Luis J. Rodr?guez Black-Brown Unity Now We must stop black-on-brown and brown-on-black conflict. This is one of the key issues of urban America today. In California, this...
...In fact, many early school segregation battles of the last century involved segregated Mexican schools in Texas and other states...
...I did mentoring and gang prevention work with both Latino and African American youth...
...My second wife was African American—one time I had to stand up to a relative when he used the “n” word in her presence...
...The key to black-and-brown unity in this country is leadership...
...Chicano youth took part in civil disturbances for better schools and against the Vietnam War in cities like L.A., Denver, and Chicago...
...to discuss black-and-brown issues with a leading African American community organizer...
...And blacks and browns apparently have an equal number of attacks against one another, which goes against the media perception that Latinos are perpetrating most of the violence...
...invasion of Mexico that resulted in Mexico losing more than half of its land...
...And Chicano/Latino gangs in Los Angeles have made big news lately for shooting African Americans...
...I personally recall the vital unity among African Americans, Latinos, and white progressives during Harold Washington’s historic stint as mayor of Chicago (whose tenure lasted from 1983 until 1987, when Washington died in office...
...Many of these settlers came to Texas to expand the plantations that had reached saturation levels in the Deep South...
...De La Fuente was Dellums’s chief rival for mayor...
...I also worked with African Americans and Mexicans when I was a carpenter, truck driver, foundry smelter, a steel mill worker, and chemical refinery mechanic in my late teens and early twenties...
...The heart of the urban poor in the United States—including the largest cities like L.A., Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, and Miami—is black and brown...
...After I moved to Chicago in 1985, I lived in predominantly Puerto Rican, Mexican, and African American neighborhoods...
...It was also a motive for the subsequent U.S...
...Of course, I disputed this...
...Times survey of homicides, assaults, and robberies over the last five years showed that blacks tend to target other blacks, and Latinos other Latinos much more than they target each other...
...Despite our differences in language and culture, we face common problems: increased poverty, substandard housing, deteriorating schools, and the growing prison population...
...they need the consciousness that their very survival is tied to the common goals and actions they can achieve across social and racial barriers...
...This is the basic economic reality we face today, particularly with increased globalization...
...Recently, I was on an African American radio station in L.A...
...As a smaller and smaller group of people own an increasingly greater percentage of the social wealth, those who have little or nothing turn on each other just to get what’s left...
...Black-and-brown unity should be the solid core of a more comprehensive unity beyond races and borders for the well-being, peace, and benefit of all...
...Residents told the media that this gang has been terrorizing the black community for years...
...In fact, you wouldn’t have the urban/hip hop culture as we know it today (rapping, dancing, DJing, lowriding, and aerosol art) without both Latino and African American influences...
...Mexico had abolished slavery in the 1820s, and the country refused to allow slavery among the Anglo settlers in the Texas territories...
...Most disturbing is the level of violence in the streets...
...The future of our cities—and our country—demands this unity...
...We need to know this history...
...This is madness...
...During the 1960s and 1970s, Latinos played an underappreciated part in the civil rights movement...
...Cesar Chavez marched with Martin Luther King Jr...
...It was Mexico’s refusal to turn over escaped slaves that helped spark the U.S.-supported Texas rebellion, whose heroes included slave hunters and Indian fighters like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett...
...In the course of our mostly amiable discussion, he claimed that Latinos didn’t take part in the civil rights struggle...
...A number of murders of undocumented Mexicans in Southern states have been linked to African American assailants...
...Although we’ve fallen back into a time when groups seem hell-bent on fighting for their own particular narrow interests, we also can glimpse a growing union of the poor, the disaffected, and the abandoned in this country...
...These gangs were also reportedly involved in orchestrated attacks last year on black prisoners in county jails...
...Our assumption must be that there’s enough for everyone if we organize ourselves on a new basis of equity and regeneration...
...There were two “underground railroads,” but the southern route is rarely acknowledged in our history books...
...Later I lived in the largely Mexican/African American west side of San Bernardino when I became a daily newspaper reporter in my midtwenties...
...In California, this conflict seems to be intensifying, especially between Mexicans and Chicanos on the one side and blacks on the other...
...That’s what made the civil rights struggle so powerful...
...Latinos—particularly Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, but now including Dominicans, Central Americans, Cubans, and South Americans—have been fighting for civil and human rights for more than 150 years...
...Luis J. Rodr?guez is the author, most recently, of “Music of the Mill: A Novel” and “My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems...
...We can’t address these issues fully as long as African Americans and Latinos are at each other’s throats...
...Green was standing on a street corner with a group of other blacks when two Latino gang members allegedly came up and opened fire...
...I started out in South Central L.A., in a particularly heavy African American area, after my family moved from Mexico to the United States when I was two years old...
...One of the most tragic incidents involved the murder on December 15 of African American Cheryl Green, fourteen, allegedly by members of a Latino street gang in L.A.’s Harbor Gateway community...
...What we need to consider here is that people, despite strong cultural and social differences, need to unite when their interests coalesce...
...This unity, of course, should not be construed to be against whites, Asians, Native Americans, or other people...
...Our leaders must meet now to imagine how we can work together, how we can respond in a healing way when tragedy does strike, and how we can educate as many people as possible to the real history of unity that has brought revolutionary changes and positive results in the past...
...My experience, despite some isolated incidents like the one with my brother-in-law, is that most black and brown people do get along...
...So the brown-black alliance goes back a long way...
...At a political level, these conflicts may seem bizarre...
...A class society is based on scarcity and therefore rent with fierce competition between classes, races, and even the sexes...
...At least 10,000 slaves escaped to Mexico...
...Ihave lived in Mexican, Puerto Rican, and African American communities all my life...
...But the inter-ethnic violence isn’t increasing in the way that some in the media and politics make it out to be...
...slaveholders...
...For example, Oakland City Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente was reportedly jeered with anti-Mexican slurs this past January by the mostly African American audience during Mayor Ron Dellums’s inauguration...
...And yet, the divisions are real...
...A recent L.A...
...Before the Civil War, Mexico stood up to the U.S...
...The root of this is in the very nature of capitalist social relations...
Vol. 71 • April 2007 • No. 4
