With Donald Trump continuing to demonize immigrants, especially immigrants from Latin America, and with Republicans calling for “Mass Deportation Now,” Latinos in the US find themselves in the crosshairs of a national debate over immigration, border policy, racism, and economic justice. What can the Chicano Movement of the 20th century teach us about how to combat attacks on Latinos and other marginalized groups today? Last week, to mark the 54th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium, The Marc Steiner Show hosted a retrospective panel on the role of the Chicano Movement in building an anti-imperialist front in the US. For a follow-up discussion on how the lessons of the past can be applied to the future of Latino organizing, longtime Chicano liberation and environmental justice activist Bill Gallegos returns to the show, along with Maricela Guzman of the Mexican Solidarity Project and Eddie Bonilla, professor of history at Boston College.
Studio: Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. Bill Gallegos returns to the Marc Steiner Show today to continue our discussion about the struggles in the Chicano and Mexican American communities. Last time we spoke together, we focused on the Chicano Moratorium against the war in Vietnam when 1970, 30,000 Chicanos took to the streets to oppose the war saying “Hell, we won’t go,” and demanded the needs of the Chicanos be addressed. Bill was one of the organizers of that event and a member of the Brown Berets, which was the Mexican American organization, very much like the Black Panther Party and is still deeply involved in Liberation Road and the fight for Chicano liberation.
In our discussion today, Bill Gallegos, who is co-producing, co-hosting this series, is being joined by Maricela Guzman, who’s a military veteran, suffered through the trauma of war, works at the VA and is deeply involved in the Mexican Solidarity project. And Eddie Bonilla, who is professor of History at Boston College, where he teaches and writes about the interracial left and communist movements and has a book coming out called Homegrown Communists in the Age of Reagan: Multi-Racial Politics and Socialist Revolution. Today, we not only look back at the moratorium, most importantly see what Chicano struggle is today, what this presidential election means for that struggle, and whether Chicano work in America are going.
Bill, Maricela, Eddie, it’s great to have all three of you with us for part two of our conversation since the first one was about the moratorium 50-some years ago. Good to have you all here. So, there’s some places we could begin, but I would like to begin by kind of reflecting on where we find ourselves in 2024, the political changes that have taken place in this country, the continuing state for many people in the Latino population in California who are still suffering in poverty and discrimination and lack of work. And let’s start by just painting a bridge of what it was like then in the ’60s and early ’70s to where we find ourselves now and why you all think we find ourselves in the place that we are. And Bill, just for historical purposes, since you and I are the old guys in this project right now, why don’t you start and then we’ll go to the other two?
Bill Gallegos:
Well, thank you Marc. As we know that Trump and the MAGA Right have made a special project to demonize Mexicans. And so, that includes Chicanos, Mexicanos, Latinos. But generally, they’ve really focused on our population, which is now around 35 million people in this country. So, it’s a huge population, that would be one of the larger nations in the United Nations if we were in there. And it’s unleashing a wave of exacerbated racism against our community. So, we are not quite back to the days of no dogs or Mexicans allowed, but I think that’s what the MAGA Right intends, to have a fearful and vulnerable community that’s much easier to exploit, to oppress, to keep in our place.
So, I think that’s the idea here, and it’s a crass electoral strategy to appeal to the racism of their white voting population that is the overwhelming part of their base. So, I think that’s what’s going on here. But what’s really terrifying is this threat to unleash a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, to say that they will do a massive deportation campaign of 12 million undocumented of whom seven or eight million are Mexicans, but all of that population are extremely vulnerable. So, I think that in the 60s and 70s, we were really starting to break down the doors of higher education, ending housing segregation, opening up new avenues for our participation in society.
And what MAGA wants to do is really reverse the 20th century, but we’re in a different position now. We’re a larger community. We have a very educated and activist sector in our community. We’re very active in the union movement now. A lot of the modern, the more contemporary victories in the union movement have been with our participation. We’re a big part of the environmental justice and the educational justice movements, the movement for reproductive rights, the movement to end the genocide in Gaza. So, we’re not without resources to stand up for ourselves, but we need allies and we need support.
Marc Steiner:
And let’s go back to the perspective of folks who are fighting it now in your world, you’re still fighting too, Bill, but I just mean the younger generation coming in. And Maricela, I know that you spent your time in the military and now as an activist in education, fighting in that community. So, talk about your perspective and what you think, and then please jump right in. I want to get to you in this as well to talk about where you think we are now. What’s the crux of the struggle we’re facing in this moment?
Maricela Guzmon:
I think kind of highlighting what Bill said, the contributions of Latinx, Latinos, Chicanos, I identify myself as a Chicana. We are major players when it comes to the working force, when it comes to the federal government, for example. Even in the military, we are seeing a large influx of Latinos, Chicanos joining in the military. And so, we’ve been part of the tapestry of the American veteran community since early on, American Revolution. And I think people like MAGA forget that and the contributions that we are doing. We are a force to be reckoned for sure. I think what we’re seeing now is that there is a major movement that started with the Chicana moratorium that we saw. Like my brothers in 1980s with 187 go out, thousands of youth said, “We’re not doing this.”
So, we’re starting to see much more youth coming out and saying that they don’t want to be involved with this. And I think that’s the importance of this, that yes, we are dealing with MAGA’s time, but there is a gift within that movement is that we’re starting to see our own movement, our own wave. And for me, there’s a lot of hope with that.
Marc Steiner:
Eddie.
Eddie Bonilla:
Yeah, no. Thank you, Maricela. I also too was going to kind of bring up Prop 187 because I think so much of how I think about Chicano history, Latino history is, and social movement history in general is kind of this revolution and repression. I don’t want to use the word dialectic, but this kind of change over time where context changes. But then. we still see that kind of nativism throughout the 20th and 21st century, whether we go back to what people talked about with the Brown Scare, which is tied to what others talked about with the Black Scare and also embedded in these anti-immigration, early 20th century policies. You also have anti-communism and anti-red, anti-socialism sentiments.
So, the early 20th century, the Brown Scare that I see, right? You get McCarthyism in the 50s, but then you have the Chicano movement that I think gives so much inspiration. But then there we also saw COINTELPRO and we saw these kinds of nativist backlash in the 70s and 80s, the English-only movement that I know that Bill and Teresa were a part of, and kind of these attacks on affirmative action, these attacks on bilingual education. And then, we get Prop 187, we get the 2006 immigration marches. And it just always seems to be right that my students like to think about Latino history as a story of resilience. And I think that this is kind of that next chapter right in these responses to nativism. But I think what’s so new right now is a little bit tied into the economy, housing.
I know a lot of my students are graduating, right with thousands of dollars of debt, which is a little bit of a different context than the 60s where Reagan does implement tuition as a way to try to kind of de-radicalize campuses housing, I think of the economy. But I also think of the policing of campuses today just with schools that are coming back today. We have a lot of these kind of new policies that are being implemented about against the ability to create encampments. And so, we’re in this interesting moment of backlash, I think right now as well.
Bill Gallegos:
Marc, I’d like to say a little bit too about…
Marc Steiner:
Please, Bill, go ahead.
Bill Gallegos:
How this relates to the moratorium and the whole fight against the military industrial complex, because Trump and the MAGA Rights say that they will militarize our communities. He said, “I’ll send the National Guard in.” We’re not going to have these protests and who’s in the National Guard? The National Guard is black and brown folks and poor working-class whites.
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Bill Gallegos:
That’s who goes into these institutions. And he’s made it very, very clear that he will use this as a major arm of repression throughout the country. But again, singling out Mexicanos in his attack. So, I think this is something for us to think about because the Chicano Moratorium was a lot about our resistance to what was going on in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, what the United States was doing there, the overwhelming disproportionate casualty rate of Chicano soldiers compared to our pitiful rate of high school graduation and our participation in higher education. We were also disproportionately high in mass incarceration. We were in the jails and the prisons.
So, we were in the jails and we were in the prisons and we were in the military, but you couldn’t get us into the universities and colleges. You couldn’t get us into the good jobs. And that’s the kind of world that Trump and the MAGA Right want to recreate. So, I think that’s why the celebration of this uprising, this peaceful uprising against our oppression and for peace is so significant today.
Maricela Guzmon:
I think it’s really important to look at it. So, for example, when I joined the military, it was in 1998, but I am the oldest of four, and I would always tell this to Bill that I went to the military complex. My brother went to the prison complex. I grew up in South Central LA. We saw our city be militarized during the South Central riots. We saw the National Guard, we saw them policing our streets. When I went to New Orleans a year later after Katrina, I saw the militarization of a community coming out. You saw these private military coming out and taking over the city. So, we have already seen that. But I think what’s interesting is what MAGA wants to do, wants to magnify that. I think that we have to really look at that.
There’s a lot of soldiers who are wearing that uniform who do not want that to be part of their community. They want to protect and defend their country, and they don’t see this as a constitutional thing. So, I think it’s really important that we do talk about these conversations, but a lot of the stuff has already been done, and we see the impact, the traumatic impact of these communities that still exist because of these events.
Marc Steiner:
I’m going to say it was clear cut because nothing’s to be clear cut. But as you were talking about a moment ago, Billy, the movement 50 years ago was built around something very different and we’re facing something very different, both the war and then the rise of Chicano power and Black power in America, and the fight to push back against the racism in our country. It was glaringly in front of the struggle and we’re facing as I think all of you have alluded to at the moment, over the last 50 years since the moratorium, since the early 70s, we’ve seen this organized rise of the right wing in our country that is a huge threat to the future, to your future, to people who are younger here and to my kids and grandkids, It’s a huge threat. So, I wonder how, from your perspective inside the communities of the moment, inside the Latino and Chicano communities in California and other places, how does that struggle manifest itself? Because in many ways, when I look at how people vote in elections, it’s majority anti-MAGA, but that force is there too, and it’s growing. So, I’m just curious.
Bill Gallegos:
Well, I think this is where Eddie as a historian could talk about because in that period that we’re talking about the Chicano Moratorium, there was a strong and vibrant left.
Marc Steiner:
Yes, right, exactly.
Bill Gallegos:
A radical left in our communities, we don’t have that situation now. And Eddie can talk about what it looked like for left leadership that’s very, very rarely acknowledged, but also what it means not to have that.
Marc Steiner:
Good place to start. Thank you, Bill. Great place to start.
Eddie Bonilla:
No pressure there. No, I think one of the things I think about, and I’ve been thinking a lot about with the history of Bill’s activism and Teresa’s activism and so many others from the 60s generation is the Vietnam War being actually one of those early linchpins in creating the context for solidarity where it wasn’t just the Chicano Moratorium, but you also had Asian Americans coming out of the Bay Area with their own Thai war platforms. They also had African-Americans like Amiri Baraka and the African Liberation support Committee who were not only just looking to Vietnam and Latinos were looking to Cuba and this kind of moment of internationalism. I think just seeing decolonization movements in Africa going on. And then, the kind of solidarity that I see going on in the 60s and 70s, some would say that’s a challenge today.
But I think we do have this beautiful moment around Palestine where there is a lot of comradeship and a lot of solidarity that has been, I think, really beautiful examples of folks who are creating coalitions. I see what the people’s forum and others are doing, and in places like New York City and the turnout, the numbers that they’re putting out with the left platform. So, I think that kind of anti-imperialism is still one of those through lines that continues through from the 60s, but through the 20th and 21st century. And then I also go back to the kind of education as well where like Bill said the opening up of these campuses by youth like himself, African-Americans and others, I think the kind of youth-led movements, that’s always the young folk are always going to be the ones that tend to pull us out of…
Marc Steiner:
Always. Right.
Eddie Bonilla:
It is a personality we can have. And I think that so much of what I’ve learned in talking to folks like Bill is one, the struggle is a long-distance run. It’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. And I think that what we’re seeing today is this kind of what I’m curious about today is the way that there will be these bridges built between these movements. And that’s something that I think we could look at the 60s and 70s, the labor unions, folks like Bill and others, trying to make the unions work for them. I think we are seeing a resurgence of the labor movement today, right, with UAW and others. And so, seeing how the UAW and others will implement international policy or implement these kinds of racial justice programming for their non-white union members will be interesting. But those are just some of the things I think about where there are connections and there’s also some differences in terms of organizing.
Marc Steiner:
Maricela, do you want to jump in before I jump back?
Maricela Guzmon:
No, I want to echo what Eddie is talking about. For me right now, there’s a lot of solidarity, even within the veteran movement around Palestine, a lot of diverse voices before that would not connect are fighting around this. So, we have these international calls. So, we’re talking about not just soldiers, American soldiers, we’re talking about soldiers in the UK, we’re talking about soldiers all over Europe that don’t agree with Palestine. So, there’s this really large movement that is going on, and it has a lot to do also with our American policy. So, they’re looking at how we’re impacting other countries. So, I think that for me, that’s why there’s a lot of hope that what’s going on right now in these elections that yes, there’s a lot of things happening, but the youth are definitely making a big difference and I’m very inspired by them.
And like you said, the youth has always been part of this. From the Chicano Moratorium to my time 187 and over 10,000 youth were marching out of schools. And so, I think it’s really important to look at that and to remember our history. And that’s the issue. The biggest issue is that often in our school systems, we’re not told our history and not having this knowledge impacts the decisions that we’re going to make. Even if I knew this knowledge when I was in high school, I would change my mind and not join the military.
Marc Steiner:
Really?
Maricela Guzmon:
Yeah. Highly so. I think that it was my military experience joining the military, being stationed in Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean, working with, having Filipino workers there. It was me seeing them as, my military experience that taught me that I wanted to be an activist. I don’t want to be a part of this system that we were treating workers like my undocumented parents were being treated in the United States and I was part of that. I was oppression by wearing a uniform. So, it took me joining the military to realize that, that I wanted to be an activist.
Marc Steiner:
Well, and I think of where we find ourselves now, and first of all, let me take another step backwards. We talk in America sometimes and the movement in other places about Latino community, but it’s a diverse community, and people forget that Latinos, this is just not one thing. And it always makes me insane when people do that as if there’s this monolith that exists and that’s it. But given that in the 60s and 70s, during the time of the moratorium, there was a lot of organizing going on in communities. There was a struggle against the Vietnam war as you just talked about, Maricela, and they galvanized the movement around civil rights, the African community in the various Latino communities making that fight in America.
And we’re in a similar but different place right now. And I’m curious how you see the struggle taking form now. I think one mentioned Palestine a little bit ago, which I cover pretty intensely. And is that something people really can organize around in a mass way in community or does it have to really begin to talk about the conditions that various Latino populations face in America in their fight for full equality, economic as well? What do you think that all fits in?
Eddie Bonilla:
Yeah, I think first on the question of Latino and not being a monolith, but I just had the first day of class yesterday, and so every time I teach Latino history, the first thing we do is what even is the term Latino, right? Because there is, and I go back to that imperialism point. I think that the way I try to teach Latino history is through that kind of anti-imperialist framework where you have Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and so many stories there. And I mentioned this because I’m currently living in Boston in a place that I had not lived before. And for me, it’s always kind of this notion of like, I am California centric. I was born and raised there. I’m Guatemalan. I had the privilege of taking Chicano history in high school.
But what I have found is even in the US, the regionality and the differences, and this goes to the kind of organizing context where here in Boston you get more Puerto Rican, Dominican, now more central Americans. And I don’t actually see that changes much of the organizing itself. The environmental justice groups, at least here in Boston, are creating platforms that are bringing in labor and that are bringing in just these housing questions. So, most of the organizations I see on the ground here, like City Life, Vida Urbana, which is one of the most vibrant, who has connections to the 1960s, they just celebrated their 50th or 60th year anniversary. They are doing that work where they are trying to figure out these kind of multi-issue struggles, where I think Palestine comes in as a, now it’s a consistent stretch of that organizing, but they’re still rooted in housing, economic justice, racial justice.
And so, I go back to those questions of the current day conditions. And it really is, at least here in Boston, folks can’t pay their rent. They can’t put food on the table even though they have full-time employment. So, I think that that kind of helps to undergird a lot of the activism that I see, at least in regards to what the unions are doing, whether it’s the Massachusetts Teachers Association, but seeing them kind of try to create solidarity with one another. I was at a Palestine protest one day here, and I was marching with what was known as the Asian contingent, some comrades from Bill’s past, we gathered up together and they were carrying Asians for Palestine signs, but then we were linking up with other organizations on the kind of ground and the Asian group that we were with led by Lydia Lowe, she’s the head of the Chinese Land Trust here, which she’s now in charge of helping with low-income housing or with better housing for folks. So yeah, just some things that I’m thinking at the top of my head, but just as far as different conditions, at least here in the city of Boston.
Marc Steiner:
Maricela, you were about to say something I could see, go ahead.
Maricela Guzmon:
Yeah, I think for me, my activism, I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been able to go to other countries and talk about the workers’ rights specifically around policy, American policy, which impacts different governments. But I remember when Macri became president in Argentina, and I was there and you saw the big marches where he was just firing people. They went into work and then they had their pink slip and they had no benefits. So, seeing these mass movements come in and seeing workers from going to El Salvador two years ago and working on workers’ rights, and they had a conference where they were connecting with people from South Africa. So, making these connections about these worker rights. So, there’s always these connections in a lot of places.
For me, a couple of years ago too, I went to Mauritius and I was talking about the rights of the people in Diego Garcia, the land rights. So, there’s still a lot of policies are impacting where we can work together as a whole and connect, and we are doing that. I think often we don’t see it because the media doesn’t show it. That’s one of the biggest things. What’s great about now is it’s our media that the youth have. We have a different platform where we can showcase what we’re doing. I think that’s one of our tools that we’re utilizing now. Again, it’s very big. It’s different than five years ago. I’ve seen a big change. We can get contact information, we can get news now from activists in the streets and I think that’s where we’re starting to see that impact. So, I’m inspired by that.
But yeah, I’ve been able to connect not only as a veteran, but as a child of immigrants around labor work and connecting again, which is we talk about the basic human rights, the ability to be able to work, the ability to be able to get food. I can tell you this, I make a lot more money than my parents did, but I don’t have the lifestyle my parents did. My father was a hotel worker. My mother was working at the warehouse, their income, they were able to buy a house. I think a lot of people, professional Chicanos, Latinx, they’re not able to have the American dream. They can’t buy the house. We’re drowning in school debt, we’re drowning in credit card debt, and we’re living paycheck to paycheck.
Marc Steiner:
So, I mean, we’re facing, there’s a real battle I think within many communities, especially communities of color, some working-class communities within the left itself over how to deal with what we’re facing at the moment, how to address it. I mean, in some ways, during the late 60s, early 70s, it was, you knew exactly what you were confronting. You were confronting the Vietnam war, and everybody was going to Vietnam. And now, it’s only working-class kids who volunteer, who go to fight. The struggle is a little different. And the fight inside of inner=city communities, working class communities had a different intensity at that moment just because of the newness of it all and what we were facing.
And now, as I said earlier, we have this rise of the MAGA Right, and as I refer to it as a kind of this right-wing, neo-fascist, racist movement that is really galvanized. So, in terms of the Mexican American world, the Chicano world, and the Latino world in America, which in some of the communities within the Latino world is actually really split around the whole MAGA or non-MAGA, what do you think the struggle takes us and takes those communities? And how do you confront it? What’s the way to confront it?
Bill Gallegos:
Well, I’ll just say, I know there’s been a number of articles about Chicanos and I Latinos moving to the right and moving to the Republican party, but…
Marc Steiner:
Right, right.
Bill Gallegos:
The UCLA Latino Policy Institute did a study of actual voting records in the midterm elections. And overwhelmingly, 65 to 70% of Chicano and Latino votes went to the Democrats. Any political party in the world would kill for that percentage voter support.
Marc Steiner:
I read that this morning, right.
Bill Gallegos:
That doesn’t mean that we should be very concerned about the Republican efforts to court our community in some kind of sleazy ways that they’re doing. And I think some of it is they try to pit us against African-Americans. We share your family values and your work ethic as if there’s some community out there that doesn’t have those family values and doesn’t have that work ethic. It’s a very insidious form of divide and conquer. But I think if we look at the role that our community plays, so we’ve talked about labor, but if we just talk about the electoral arena, Chicano and Latino votes are decisive in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and probably Illinois and things are even starting to shift in Texas where it’s always been much more conservative.
So, we’re an extremely important social force for the fight against this neo-fascist movement that you’re talking about, which is out to win the White House and obviously Congress and the Senate. But they already control the number of state governments, and we know what they’re doing in Texas where with that control of the state government, they’d militarize their own border. They put razor wire in the Rio Grande so people can get chewed up as they try in their desperation to escape poverty and violence. In Arizona, they’re talking about legislation that would allow Arizona homeowners on the border to shoot on site anyone that they think is undocumented immigrant coming onto their land.
Marc Steiner:
Unbelievable.
Bill Gallegos:
So, this is the vision that they have, but our population is, we’re situated in a number of areas where we can really have an impact. I think one of the problems that we face is we need more unity. This is always a problem. I’ll just give you an example. We’re celebrating the 54th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium. We have four different celebrations going on, not coordinated. I’m doing mine, and I’m the one that, we don’t have the luxury of that, that we do not have the luxury of that kind of disunity, and that applies across the board. We need a lot more unity on the left and a lot of other things. But I think especially in our community, that’s really important. And when we talk about the broader kind of Latino, Latina community, I think we need to look at the populations, the larger populations that tend to be my own bias is to exclude the Cuban-American community because they generally are to the right.
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Bill Gallegos:
There’s a lot of historical reasons why they tend to do what they do. But for the Puerto Rican population, central American population and the Chicano Mexican population, these are the largest populations. And when they do polling on strong environmental and climate laws, we’re like in 70% in support. Medicare for all, 60, 70% in support, increased funding for public education, 60 or 70% support. I mean, there’s all across the board, our communities tend to lean progressive, tend to lead towards more inclusive policies. The question is how do we mobilize this in a way that can really be effective? And what I’m seeing and what Eddie sees and Maricela sees, and you see Marc, when we see these vibrant social communities out there, the right wing sees that too. It’s no accident that they’ve chosen to focus and target on our communities, partly because we’re vulnerable, of course. But also, they’re watching what’s going on in Mexico that scares them, that scares them.
It’s interesting how the United States and Canada are up in arms because the Moreno party and the AMLO government say, “We’re going to make our Supreme Court justices have to run for office, and they’re going to have term limits. And by the way, they can’t keep making these outrageous salaries.” I wish we had that here. I’m telling you, I wish we had that here. That’s an expansion of democracy. But you would think they had just thrown poop into the punch bowl if you listen to the US Ambassador and the Canadian Ambassador. So, I think these are all the kinds of phenomenon that are really scaring the ruling class in this country, and especially the MAGA Right.
Marc Steiner:
Where do you think that it goes from here, what the organizing on the ground looks like now, where the fight takes your generation, this next generation that we face?
Maricela Guzmon:
I think for me, working with different organizations, not just locally in the United States, looking at Mexico, looking at what other countries are doing, we need to learn from their lessons. I think that there’s a lot of great organizing happening in South and Central America that we can work with. I think that you can have this international aspect. We see it, again, we keep talking about Palestine, but this is something that it’s really important to look at how we become organizers. So, there’s that connection there. And I also think looking at, for example, we talked about the Cuban-American community, younger Cubanos are shifting to our side that the new generation are starting to see. So, not leaving out the new generation.
I think what happens often that a lot of these activist groups, they don’t target the youth. And I think that’s one of our weakness that we really need to create a space for young activists to play a lead role in this movement. And that’s really important for me as an activist. I know that it’s important to create that space for them too, but it’s continuing learning for me, continuing learning. I can’t go back to the past, but I have to continue to learn in the history, and I have to learn from the young activists that are taking Palestine. They’re doing things that I wasn’t doing that I didn’t even think about. And I think that it’s important to look at that. Technology has been a major play right now to looking at our technology, using our technology. We’re going to do that really well, canvassing. And so, there’s a lot of things that you can do where you don’t need the money that MAGA has. We have a lot of these tools already in place, so utilizing that.
Eddie Bonilla:
And I just wanted to jump in and I think bring both sets of comments together. I think of our current present moment and with this election on the horizon, and all this conversation about Kamala Harris being a border czar and her new kind of platform, having some immigration policies and some other policies that mirror almost what Trump was trying to do. But I think of the opening, I’ve lately been editing a chapter on electoral politics through the Jesse Jackson campaign that Bill and Teresa and others were key movers in.
But so was the left, the new communist movement and other organizations that were active in this kind of struggle within the Democratic Party, where the history goes that the Democrats, people like Bill Clinton and others behind the scenes pulled some levers and were able to kind of change the rules a little bit in terms of Jesse Jackson’s delegate total in terms of the kind of representation that he would’ve had. It could have been a vice president, president candidate, had they followed some of the rules.
Marc Steiner:
I remember that very well.
Eddie Bonilla:
Yeah. Yeah. I think about that opening, and I think about that opening with the rhetoric around like, can we push democratic candidates to the left or further to the left. When we saw what happens with Clinton in the 90s is we actually saw the Democratic Party take that right wing swing. Where now that’s the question on my mind is where will Harris lie? And where the uncommitted movement and how others are trying to push, they were trying to push for different, even for speaking time at the DNC and did not receive a chance to speak. But so, I think of the Democratic Party Project 2025 is on my mind lately too. And to tie it back to education as well and these attacks in Florida, we saw the attacks in Arizona against Chicano studies, but I know Teresa and others are in California still fighting to integrate ethnic studies where this is a 65-year struggle or 60-year struggle of people just wanting their stories to be told in historical curriculum.
And so, I often talk to folks from the League of Revolutionary Struggle, these veterans from the new communist movement, and it’s almost like having to reinvent the wheel where capitalism or democracy or whatever ism we want to tie to it, it often makes it hard for us to retell the stories of activists like Bill activists, even Malcolm X, where we want to defang. I think some of the political aspects of others like Martin Luther King Jr. who, Jack O’Dell, who ends up helping lead the Jesse Jackson campaign, has ties to the Communist party and ties to Martin Luther King Jr. So, that’s kind of where I’ve been thinking lately. And I think the popular front component of the right wing.
There’s a new book that just came out by this guy, David Austin Walsh, where he’s talking about the post 50s and how there was actually a right-wing popular front that brought together politicians, educators, students that brought different stakeholders into this kind of right wing movement that gets us to write the new right of the 70s and the 80s. And so, I’m just wondering about what those folks are doing behind the scenes, the project 2025 folks and others in terms of the capital that they’re putting behind everything as low as school board elections.
So that local state level, I think that’s something different that we have this year than in years past in that I think there has been a lot of successful movements, whether it was in Ferguson, post-Black Lives Matter or in other smaller elections that we do see candidates running with progressive values. And we can talk more about the DSA and kind of those candidates. But yeah, I think that’s it.
Marc Steiner:
In some of that, I think I would like to come back and have that conversation as we watch this election unfold. I think that’d be important to explore that in greater depth.
Bill Gallegos:
So, Marc, I’d like to say a little bit about this if it’s okay.
Marc Steiner:
Oh, go ahead, please.
Bill Gallegos:
Yeah, so I’d say there’s a couple of things that I think. One is for oppressed communities like ours, the Chicano Latino community, overwhelmingly working class, overwhelmingly. We have expanded our middle class, our intelligentsia, and so on and so forth, but we’re overwhelmingly working-class populations. Young activists need to go there. That’s where we need organizing for that sector that is the most oppressed and has the least representation. So, I think we need to not, I’m not talking about getting a job as a union staffer. I’m not talking about heading a nonprofit. I’m talking about we did back in the day kind of, a little bit dogmatically, go to the point of production, get a job in a warehouse.
Marc Steiner:
That’s right.
Bill Gallegos:
And I think one really important area is public education. These unions are growing. A lot of our public schools now are overwhelmingly oppressed students of color. And I think that’s always been a very, very vibrant arena of struggle for oppressed communities and working-class communities. So, that’s one thing. I’d like to see young activists help get our working class organized. I think that would really be something strong. I think second thing, I think we need a proliferation of political education study groups, and we do have, like Amari is mentioning, now we have the social media where we can be much more extensive and much more creative than we were in the past.
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Bill Gallegos:
But we need to do that kind of political education that helps young activists understand that the root problem is capitalism and imperialism, and that there is a vision of a new society that they can really hold onto and help develop. So, I think those are a couple of the arenas where we need to work. And then, I think we can’t ignore the electoral arena as challenging as it is, and I think we have to help build up the left of that arena, the DSA candidates that have run for office here in Los Angeles, or the squad, or the working families’ party. I think we really need to really begin to build that. And I think we should look at Mexico and France. So, Mexico, because the Morena party, which recently just overwhelmingly won local, state, regional, and the presidential election…
Marc Steiner:
It was mind blowing. Yes, absolutely, yes.
Bill Gallegos:
That’s a left united front. There are all kinds of left organizations that are part of Morena.
Marc Steiner:
That’s right.
Bill Gallegos:
All kinds of lefties are part of Morena, and they came together in a common cause. That’s what happened in France where they gave ass thumping to the right. And now of course, Macron doesn’t want to give them the fruits of their victory, but I think we need something similar here. We have a number of left-wing socialist organizations of my own, Liberation Road, but we still have a communist party. We have the New African People’s organization, we’ve got the Red Nation, we’ve got North Star, we’ve got Sections of Democratic Socialists of America. Why can’t we come together as part of an anti-fascist united front?
So, I think these are some of the things that I would like to see come out of this turbulent period that we’re in. But I think especially for these young folks, don’t forget our working people. We got people still out in the fields that are getting burned to death in the heat waves. We’ve got people in the warehouses and public health and healthcare and in public schools. Let’s be there side by side with those [foreign language 00:39:23] and help them get organized and united.
Marc Steiner:
That’s a really important point you’ve just made. So, let me turn to our other guests here, to Eddie and Maricela to kind of pick up on those points from your perspective in the places where you were in the struggle in your generations and close this out with picking up on Bill’s thoughts. Eddie, you want to start? And then we go to Maricela. Let Maricela be the cleanup batter.
Eddie Bonilla:
Yeah. I’ll just echo the point about education that Bill’s talking about. I think for me, as an educator in the classroom, I often teach these difficult subjects that are under attack across the nation. But for me, it’s finding that beauty and solidarity, so much of what I spend my time thinking about and dealing with is those moments of solidarity. Whether it was the Bakke decision in 1974, which was attacking affirmative action, whether it was Jesse Jackson’s, Rainbow Coalition, presidential campaigns, but that kind of solidarity that was also there for the Chicano Moratorium, the moratorium bringing, it wasn’t just lefties, it was nationalists, it was ultra-nationalists, it was every ism you can think under the sun marching in this.
So, I think having that political education that allows for folks to really grapple with these various different ideas. But I think back to my students, the lived context that they’re graduating in, I do find a receptiveness to some of these more radical histories where I do think there’s a lot of frustration. There is this kind of throwing up your hands in the air and being like, “Well, what do we do now?” Because there is so many fronts that fascism is fighting on. It’s the economy, it’s labor, it’s politics, there’s so much.
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Eddie Bonilla:
And that it does take a multi-front movement to fight those various fronts. So, just to kind of echo Bill on that, I think that that education is important where you get those stories of Black-Brown coalitions of Asian and Latino coalitions. You get these stories that are rooted in the working class, but also recognize that you have to work with the middle class, you have to work with politicians, you have to work with the intelligentsia. It has to be a multi-front and a multi-people movement. So, I think I have a lot of hope in the young generation. I think that they might not be as, there’s some dogmatism maybe somewhere here and there, but I don’t think they’re as dogmatic in some ways. I think they’re…
Marc Steiner:
That’s what they said about us too.
Eddie Bonilla:
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. But I think just that kind receptiveness to, I know that we are a few years past the end of the Cold War, and we are seeing Trump weaponizing again, kind of that Kamala as a communist and trying to use that anti-communist kind of rhetoric, which we can laugh at. But I think that it is, because so much of what has been struggled for is basic human rights. I always teach students, I show them the Black Panther platform program, the Young Lords program, the Brown Berets programs, and I’m always kind of like, “Well, what’s radical about this?” And when you read the points, you’re just kind of like, oh, hospitals that actually work, a roof over my head, food for lunch.
Marc Steiner:
Right, right.
Eddie Bonilla:
And so, I think that the fact that, going back to Maricela’s point, the fact that she and I are in different positions than our parents, and yet we’re still struggling in many of the same ways, I think just shows us that capitalism the same way that activists retool and create new strategies, capitalism also finds new ways to quell those strategies and also finds new ways for us to have to create new approaches. And so, I go back to that dialectic point where there is this kind of moving of battlegrounds, but also this persistent arc of just activism from folks like Bill and Teresa who are still on the front lines after these battles of Reaganism and neoliberalism. They are, I think, indicative of that need for intergenerational conversations, the youth with our elders, with our comrades. So yeah, that’s what I think I would say.
Marc Steiner:
Maricela.
Maricela Guzmon:
I think for me is I live in East LA, and one of the things that I do is I get to know my neighbors. Because I think when we start looking at local policy, because there’s a lot of working class in my neighbors. There are neighbors, elder neighbors who are 80 years old who want to get involved, who want to have a voice, but don’t feel they’re connected. So, I’ve been very fortunate because I’ve had mentors like Bill and I’ve had mentors, and I kind of helped them navigate through what they want to see in their community as we see in gentrification, as we’re seeing the cost of housing prices and food prices, as we’re seeing the sheriffs at East LA Police more on communities. So, it’s gathering them. A lot of them don’t speak English still. So, kind of helping them translate.
So, for me, that’s what I’m doing locally. What can I do more locally? How can I have these conversations with my neighbors? Because if I can’t have conversations with my neighbors, I’m not going to be able to do the community work that I want to do. So, that’s how I’m starting myself. So that we don’t only look at these elections, presidential elections when I come around. It’s like we want to look at these local elections every time. So that’s one of the things I want to do. And again, I am still learning from the youth. I need to step back and let them take the leadership.
And one last thing is making sure that there’s going to be times and places with different organizations that we’re going to disagree, but I think it’s important to come together and work on what’s important, because the other side is doing that. MAGA does that really well, and we need to work on that.
Marc Steiner:
Yes, yes.
Maricela Guzmon:
We can still disagree, we can still work on our different struggles, but there’s struggles that we can connect with where we can fight and defeat MAGA. But that’s the real challenge right now.
Marc Steiner:
So, this conversation in many ways is really important. And it was a good conversation to have on the tales of our conversation about the Chicano Moratorium. And I think that it begs that we should have more conversations with different sectors in the Latino world across this country and dialogue with each other, but also in dialogue with others to really kind of struggle with where this movement goes now and where we take it, and how we face down what we face.
And along with Bill, as one of the two elders in the room, I think it’s really important because I think that we have to really wrestle with what the younger generation is going to face and the future’s going to face and what we’re facing now and the really critical role that the Chicano Latino communities are going to play on that in the fight here in America and across the globe. So, I just wanted to lay that out. And I want to say thank you to all of you and Bill Gallegos, I want to appreciate your co-hosting and co-producing in helping make these first two segments work and I look forward to making many more segments work.
Bill Gallegos:
Thank you, Marc and thank you Real News Network. This is just a wonderful resource for our communities, and we’re very appreciative and I’m really glad that because I know Mari and Eddie are both really, really busy, and I so much appreciate you taking the time out to be a part of this.
Marc Steiner:
This is great. Yeah, Maricela Guzman and Eddie Bonilla, it was great to meet you both, and I look forward to staying in touch and having many more conversations and really pushing this agenda because we have to figure out where the moving going next, and you are the future pushing that agenda. So, thank all three of you so much for taking your time to hear The Marc Steiner Show on the Real News, and Bill for helping co-host and produce this. Thank you both, all three.
Eddie Bonilla:
Thank you.
Bill Gallegos:
Thank you.
Maricela Guzmon:
Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
And thank you to Maricela Guzman and Eddie Bonilla for joining us, and of course, Bill Gallegos for this idea and help you to produce this series. And thanks to Cameron Granadino for running the program today, audio editor, Alina Nehlich, Rosette Sewali for producing the The Marc Steiner Show, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making an all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. So, for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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