"Ironically," he writes of the years following Resurrection City, "those who boldly pursued multiracial coalition just a year or two earlier stressed race-based identity politics as essential not just to meet their political needs of the moment but also to establish genuine coalition among the nation's politically weak and disempowered poor sometime in the not-so-distant future." (189) In the final chapter, he shows how those legacies of the Poor People's Campaign resonated in the
Raza Unida party, the Gary Black Power convention, and other iconic examples of identity politics in the 1970s.
The oppression of the Chicano/Mexicano nation was the driving force behind such organizations as the Alianza Federal de las Mercedes, the Chicano Student Movement, the United Farm Workers, Crusade for Justice, La
Raza Unida Party, the Brown and Black Berets and many other groups.
Thus, both Zionism and the anti-Zionist leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, earn entries, as do the anti- immigration Minutemen and the Chicano rights la
Raza Unida Party. The majority of entries do tend to be representative of the political left, because it is the left that has most consistently included social justice in its myriad platforms.
Majors and minors in Chicano/a Studies asked, for example, whether the long-standing focus on farmworker leader Cesar Chavez, land-rights activist Reies Lopez Tijerina, the recently deceased Crusade for Justice leader Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales and La Raza Unida Party's Jose Angel Gutierrez--the four main figures of the movimiento--adequately captured its multi-dimensional history or related to today's political landscape.
The first, Symbols of Resistance, recounts the life stories of Ricardo Falcon, a leader of the Colorado movimiento who was murdered by a racist gas station owner while on his way to the 1972 National Convention of La Raza Unida Party; of "Los Seis de Boulder," six Colorado activists who died in mysterious car bomb explosions in May 1974; and of Luis "Junior" Martinez, shot to death by Denver police.
What Chavez finds is that "radical" elements, most notably the Brown Berets, the La
Raza Unida Party, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, and CASA (Centro de Accion Social Autonomo), had given the movement a decidedly "leftist" tenor through the use of a complex and often contradictory language of revolution, nationalism, and identity.
It raised one hell of a stir and was widely circulated by La
Raza Unida Party years later ...
describes the diverse political agendas within La Raza Unida Party (RUP) and the parallel process by which those students inspired by Marxism in its various forms abandoned MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) chapters they considered to be mired in narrow nationalism.
Many of them, such as the August Twenty-Ninth Collective or August Twenty-Ninth Movement (ATM), had their origins in earlier cultural nationalist organizations such as the Brown Berets and La Raza Unida Party. Internal dissension with regard to political objectives and ideologies led one group of Los Angeles Brown Berets to form a Labor Committee for the Raza Unida Party which eventually became the core group for the Collective.
For some of the founders of La Raza Unida Party, therefore, Chavez's efforts to keep Chicanos in the Democrat camp were counterproductive if not outright "treason":