The Young Chicanos for Community Action was an organization that used military-style efforts to facilitate social change and fight injustice in Mexican-American communities.
In the 1960s, Mexican-American youth began to reject what they perceived as limited opportunities available to them in white, middle-class America. They adopted the term Chicano, previously seen as derogatory by earlier generations, as a personal and political identifier meant to exemplify ethnic pride. Chicano youth of the 1960s, often working-class Mexican Americans with better access to higher education than previous generations, challenged earlier notions of political accommodation and assimilation as the only means to achieve equal status in a racist society.
Part of the larger Latino movement, the Young Chicanos for Community Action, founded by David Sanchez and four Chicanos in East Los Angeles, began as a service club to assist the neighborhood. Later the organization adopted a paramilitary stance and evolved into a defensive patrol, which tried to protect local residents. It welcomed both men and women into the organization, many of whom were young Mexican Americans who sought a goal of becoming leaders in their own communities.
Formed under the name Young Citizens for Community Action in 1967, the group established headquarters for its activities at a Los Angeles coffeehouse, “La Peranya,” using the facility as an office and meeting hall. Shortly after forming, the organization changed its name to Young Chicanos for Community Action, and shortly thereafter to the Brown Berets, after the article of clothing chosen as a sign of unity. Despite the changes in name and the closing of the coffeehouse in 1968, group members became leaders in the Chicano movement, effectively mobilizing their members for protest. Satellite chapters formed throughout the Midwest and Southwest.
The organization fought against inequality in both schools and mainstream white society. While in California, the Brown Berets joined school “blow-outs,” or walkouts, staged by high school students in response to inadequate teaching and facilities. Police in Los Angeles made efforts to disband the group by raiding its headquarters, slandering members, and encouraging members of counter organizations to attack Brown Beret members. The police sought to discredit the group in the eyes of both the white and the Chicano communities. Sanchez led the group at the National Chicano Moratorium on August 29, 1970, in East Los Angeles, where leaders of the Chicano movement protested against the Vietnam War, citing a 19 percent casualty rate for Mexican Americans in the war compared with a 12 percent rate for all Americans. In 1972, the Brown Berets occupied Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles in the hope of raising awareness of the plight of Chicanos.
Further reading: Carlos Munoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (London: Verso, 1989).
—Toni Nelson Herrara
Youth See childhood; teenagers.
World History
