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Juan Valdez (1938 - August 25, 2012) was a land-grant activist who fired the first shot during a 1967 New Mexico courthouse raid that seized international attention and helped spark the Chicano Movement.
Valdez was born in 1938 in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico.
Heir to a northern New Mexico land grant, Valdez was 29 years old when he and a group of land grant advocates, led by Reies Lopez Tijerina, raided a Rio Arriba County courthouse in Tierra Amarilla. Their goal was to attempt a citizen's arrest of then-District Attorney Alfonso Sanchez over Hispanic land rights issues. [1]
Valdez had gotten involved with Tijerina's group, known as Alianza Federal de Mercedes — an organization founded to help Mexican-American heirs to old Spanish land grants reclaim land that was illegally taken by white settlers and the U.S. government. [2]
"Tijerina impressed me when he and most of the people who had walked from Albuquerque set up a camp and refused to leave," Valdez told retired lawyer Mike Scarborough in the book " Trespassers On Our Own Land ," an oral history of the Valdez family. During the raid, it was Valdez who shot and wounded state police officer Nick Saiz after the officer went for his pistol and refused commands by Valdez to put his hands up. "It came down to, I shoot him or he was going to shoot me — so I pulled the trigger," Valdez said in the book. "Lucky for both of us, he didn't die." [3] The raiders also beat a deputy and took a sheriff and reporter hostage. After holding at the courthouse for a couple of hours, the armed group fled to the mountains as the National Guard and armored tanks chased them away.
Valdez was convicted of assault but was later pardoned by Governor Bruce King. The episode cemented Valdez and Tijerina's legacy among activists from the Chicano Movement of the 1970s who favored more radical methods of fighting discrimination over those of the moderate Mexican American civil rights leaders a generation before.
"He loved the attention," said daughter Juanita Montoya, 48. "He wanted people to know our history and what happened to our land." [4]
Valdez died peacefully from apparent heart conditions at his Canjilon ranch on August 25, 2012. [5]
Chicano or Chicana is an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans who have a non-Anglo self-image, embracing their Mexican Native ancestry. Chicano was originally a classist and racist slur used toward low-income Mexicans that was reclaimed in the 1940s among youth who belonged to the Pachuco and Pachuca subculture. In the 1960s, Chicano was widely reclaimed in the building of a movement toward political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of indigenous descent. Chicano developed its own meaning separate from Mexican American identity. Youth in barrios rejected cultural assimilation into whiteness and embraced their own identity and worldview as a form of empowerment and resistance. The community forged an independent political and cultural movement, sometimes working alongside the Black power movement.
Tierra Amarilla is a census-designated place in and the county seat of Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, United States.
Alianza Federal de Mercedes, which in English translates to Federal Land Grant Alliance, was a group led by Reies Tijerina based in New Mexico in the 1960s that fought for the land rights of Hispano New Mexicans.
Reies López Tijerina, was an activist who led a struggle in the 1960s and 1970s to restore New Mexican land grants to the descendants of their Spanish colonial and Mexican owners. As a vocal spokesman for the rights of Hispanos and Mexican Americans, he became a major figure of the early Chicano Movement and founded the Alianza Federal de Mercedes. As an activist, he worked in community education and organization, media relations, and land reclamations. He became famous and infamous internationally for his 1967 armed raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse located on the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant whose lands, originally designated for Hispanic settlers, had largely been acquired by Anglo ranchers and land developers.
The Brown Berets is a pro-Chicano paramilitary organization that emerged during the Chicano Movement in the late 1960s. David Sanchez and Carlos Montes co-founded the group modeled after the Black Panther Party. The Brown Berets was part of the Third World Liberation Front. It worked for educational reform, farmworkers' rights, and against police brutality and the Vietnam War. It also sought to separate the American Southwest from the control of the United States government.
Chicano Park is a 32,000 square meter park located beneath the San Diego–Coronado Bridge in Barrio Logan, a predominantly Chicano or Mexican American and Mexican-migrant community in central San Diego, California. The park is home to the country's largest collection of outdoor murals, as well as various sculptures, earthworks, and an architectural piece dedicated to the cultural heritage of the community. Because of the magnitude and historical significance of the murals, the park was designated an official historic site by the San Diego Historical Site Board in 1980, and its murals were officially recognized as public art by the San Diego Public Advisory Board in 1987. The park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 owing to its association with the Chicano Movement, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016. Chicano Park, like Berkeley's People's Park, was the result of a militant people's land takeover. Every year on April 22, the community celebrates the anniversary of the park's takeover with a celebration called Chicano Park Day.
Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales was a Mexican-American boxer, poet, political organizer, and activist. He was one of many leaders for the Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado. The Crusade for Justice was an urban rights and Chicano cultural urban movement during the 1960s focusing on social, political, and economic justice for Chicanos. Gonzales convened the first-ever Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in 1968, which was poorly attended due to timing and weather conditions. He tried again in March 1969, and established what is commonly known as the First Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. This conference was attended by many future Chicano activists and artists. It also birthed the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a pro-indigenist manifesto advocating revolutionary Chicano nationalism and self-determination for all Chicanos. Through the Crusade for Justice, Gonzales organized the Mexican American people of Denver to fight for their cultural, political, and economic rights, leaving his mark on history. He was honored with a Google Doodle in continued celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States on 30 September 2021.
Chicanismo emerged as the cultural consciousness behind the Chicano Movement. The central aspect of Chicanismo is the identification of Chicanos with their Indigenous American roots to create an affinity with the notion that they are native to the land rather than immigrants. Chicanismo brought a new sense of nationalism for Chicanos that extended the notion of family to all Chicano people. Barrios, or working-class neighborhoods, became the cultural hubs for the people. It created a symbolic connection to the ancestral ties of Mesoamerica and the Nahuatl language through the situating of Aztlán, the ancestral home of the Aztecs, in the southwestern United States. Chicanismo also rejected Americanization and assimilation as a form of cultural destruction of the Chicano people, fostering notions of Brown Pride. Xicanisma has been referred to as an extension of Chicanismo.
The Chicano Movement, also referred to as El Movimiento, was a social and political movement in the United States that worked to embrace a Chicano/a identity and worldview that combated structural racism, encouraged cultural revitalization, and achieved community empowerment by rejecting assimilation. Chicanos also expressed solidarity and defined their culture through the development of Chicano art during El Movimiento, and stood firm in preserving their religion.
El Teatro Campesino is a Chicano theatre company in California. Performing in both English and Spanish, El Teatro Campesino was founded in 1965 as the cultural arm of the United Farm Workers and the Chicano Movement with the "full support of César Chávez." Originally based in Delano, California, during the Delano Strike, the theatre is currently based in San Juan Bautista, California.
Luis Miguel Valdez is an American playwright, screenwriter, film director and actor. Regarded as the father of Chicano film and playwriting, Valdez is best known for his play Zoot Suit, his movie La Bamba, and his creation of El Teatro Campesino. A pioneer in the Chicano Movement, Valdez broadened the scope of theatre and arts of the Chicano community.
Las Gorras Blancas was a group active in the New Mexico Territory and American Southwest in the late 1880s and early 1890s, in response to Anglo-American squatters. Founded in April 1889 by brothers Juan Jose, Pablo, and Nicanor Herrera, with support from vecinos in the New Mexico Territory communities of El Burro, El Salitre, Ojitos Frios, and San Geronimo, in present-day San Miguel County.
Juan Felipe Herrera is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. He is a major figure in the literary field of Chicano poetry.
The Tierra Amarilla Land Grant in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado consists of 594,516 acres (2,405.92 km2) of mountainous land. The government of New Mexico awarded it to Manuel Martinez and his offspring in 1832. The grant was settled by Hispanics in the 1860s and the original inhabitants, the Ute Indians, were induced to leave. Settlers were given small plots, but most of the land in the grant area was designated as common land for the use of all the settlers and their descendants. After its conquest of New Mexico in 1846, the United States government upheld the validity of the grant, but subsequent actions by the U.S. did not protect the right to access common lands by the settlers. Politician and land speculator Thomas Catron, a member of the Santa Fe Ring, acquired nearly all the land by 1883 but later sold it to a development company. Access to the common lands of the grant by the Hispanic settlers and their descendants gradually disappeared as the common land became owned by Anglo ranchers, development companies, and speculators.
The Chicano Art Movement represents groundbreaking movements by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement which began in the 1960s.
La Marcha Por La Humanidad, also known as the Chicano Mural, is a mural housed at the University Center on the campus of the University of Houston. In 1973 artist Mario Gonzales and Ruben Reyna painted the mural. Both Mario Gonzales and Ruben Reyna were Vietnam veterans and UH students. Funding for the mural was obtained from the university's chapter of the Mexican American Youth Organization. The mural depicts the political angst of the Chicano Movement, featuring Uncle Sam with a skull in place of a head, an effect popular in twentieth-century Mexican and Chicano art. It is twelve by fifty five feet in height and length.
Andres Valdez is an American social activist from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The following is a timeline of Latino civil rights in the United States.
The People's Constitutional Party was a political party active in the U.S. state of New Mexico during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Pensamiento Serpentino is a poem by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez originally published by Cucaracha Publications, which was part of El Teatro Campesino, in 1973. The poem famously draws on philosophical concepts held by the Mayan people known as In Lak'ech, meaning "you are the other me." The poem also draws, although less prominently, on Aztec traditions, such as through the appearance of Quetzalcoatl. The poem received national attention after it was illegally banned as part of the removal of Mexican American Studies Programs in Tucson Unified School District. The ban was later ruled unconstitutional.
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