Interview of Cruz Olmeda Becerra
UCLA Library, Center for Oral History Research, University of California, Los Angeles Interview of Cruz Olmeda Becerra

Transcript

Session One (May 10, 2013)





ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is May 10th. It’s Mother’s Day in—





BECERRA:

Mexico.





ESPINO:

—yeah, Latin America, and I’m interviewing Mr. Cruz Becerra at his home in—is this your home?





BECERRA:

This is where I live.





ESPINO:

In Commerce, California. Well, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to interview with me. I’m really looking forward to this series of interviews, and I’d like you to start with your birth date and what you can tell me about your family history, your parents, if you know anything about your grandparents.



0:01:37

BECERRA:

Okay. I was born May 3, 1945, which means last week I turned sixty-eight. My family is from Jalisco. My generation was born here. My parents were born—they’re from Jalisco. They came here, I think in 1944 for my mom and 1943 for my dad. My dad came here for a year to save up money. Then he went back home in ’44 to marry her and bring her back. So he came back here in 1944, and they were both undocumented and they had [unclear]. So the name on the documents that they had, the last name was Olmeda, so that’s why I was born with the last name Olmeda. That’s on my birth certificate, but that’s not our family name.

Later, years later, when my father legalized his status and became a citizen, he put his family name, Becerra, but it was too late for us. We were already born with Olmeda. So when I was in the navy, right before I got discharged, I was in Hawaii in 1966 and I had a legal name change while I was in the navy. I changed my name back to Becerra, my family name, but I thought that when you did that, it automatically got changed on your birth certificate. I sent a letter in to the Recorder’s Office here, and they sent me a letter back, says "No, we’re not going to change it on your birth certificate." So I thought, "Well, I guess my name’s still Olmeda." [laughs] So I stayed with Olmeda until 1977. My daughter was born in 1976, my first child, but I gave her the name Becerra because you can give your children whatever name you want. It’s your child. So she was born with Becerra, and then the year later, in New Mexico, I changed it to Becerra and then everything was explained to me. My name was now Cruz Becerra. So that’s why in the early days that my [unclear] was Olmeda.





ESPINO:

Yeah, because some of the court documents say Olmeda.



0:04:07

BECERRA:

Yeah, all the court documents say Olmeda. Anyway, before my parents came, my grandfather came, I guess, around the time of the Mexican Revolution, but he must have been traveling back and forth. So some of my aunts and uncles were born in the teens, before 1910 and as late as 1926, I think. She had seven children, and my dad was born in 1916. My grandfather came here, but he would come with permits and then he would go back. I went on ancestry.com and I found a document from when my grandfather’s picture from 1930, and so he had permission to come from 1930 to 1932 as a laborer. But when they came way back in—that wasn’t the first time he come. He’d come way back during the Mexican Revolution, he came, and at that time he came with his brother, my great-uncle Jesus and Jose, Jose Becerra.

My grandfather’s name was Cruz Becerra also. I was born on his birthday, so I was named for my grandfather, Cruz Becerra. But he and his brother Jose decided to bring their parents to the U.S. because they were old. They wanted to take care of them, so they brought them over here, so that my great-grandparents came over here. They were born in 1865 and they died in 1935. I think one was born in—my great-grandfather was born in 1862 and my great-grandmother in 1865, and they both died in 1935. The reason I know that is because I went to Orange County and there’s only one cemetery there, which is Westminster, so I called them up and asked them if my great-grandfather was buried there. Said yes, so I went there.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

And I saw the stone, and they’re buried side by side with their names right there.





ESPINO:

Did you take a picture?





BECERRA:

No, I’ve got to go back. [laughs] I have to go back and take a picture, and my cousin, she wants to go with me. She’s about my age. She went to the university in Utah, maybe Brigham Young, and she majored in, I guess, anthropology. She focused on Egyptians, but then afterwards she focused on the Mayas and the Aztecs and she speaks [unclear], and she wants to go with me back to the cemetery, take a picture. So she said maybe [unclear] will take flowers.





ESPINO:

Wow. So what did that feel like seeing that gravesite, do you remember?





BECERRA:

Oh, I was happy.





ESPINO:

Did your family teach you about their history? How did you find out about your name change, for example, or your father’s?





BECERRA:

Well, you know, when we were growing up and we were children, we knew our parents did not have immigration papers and we knew they could get deported and we’d go right along with them. We knew it, you know, and we ignored it, though, because we were kids and we just wanted to play all the time, you know. But our parents were always afraid, because 1954, there was a lot of immigration raids, 1954 to ’55. That’s all everybody talked about. All the factories were being raided. So we knew it. And my dad told us where our last name came from. My cousin, the one who was the anthropologist, she joined the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and she retired as a sergeant from the Sheriff’s Department. And her father, my dad’s brother, they both came together. They both came with the same papers from the same family, except they misspelled the name when they did her father’s papers. So even though we had the same last name, it’s spelled differently. I’m talking about the illegal last name, Olmeda.





ESPINO:

Olmeda.





BECERRA:

Hers is Almeda or something like that. They put an "A" instead of an "O." And she said she’s not going to change it. It’s too late. It’s too late to change it, and she doesn’t have children to pass it on to, so she’s not concerned about it. That was [unclear] family name.





ESPINO:

So then you were telling me about your parents, and you say when they came here. You mean Los Angeles?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

So they came straight from Jalisco to—their immigration was from Jalisco to Los Angeles?





BECERRA:

Yes. I think by then one of my dad’s older sisters was already here and she had married somebody already. She married a Puerto Rican, and his name was Edelmiro Gomez [phonetic], and Edelmiro Gomez’s sister is Fela Mendez, for the family. She’s the one that filed a lawsuit in Mendez versus Westminster. It’s my uncle’s sister, Edelmiro’s sister, Tía Fela. Nobody called her Felicitas. They called her Fela, Tía Fela. So my aunt married a Puerto Rican family, and then a few weeks after I was born, we moved into an apartment they had on their property in Watts on 84th and Miramonte or 82nd and Miramonte. And that’s where basically I was born there. That’s where I was just a couple of weeks after I was born. My dad was in the army at the time, and my mom went there to live with a Puerto Rican family, which they became like my grandparents, because on my mom’s side I had no grandparents. I only had a grandfather on my father’s side. So they became the Puerto Rican couple, viejitos. They were like my grandparents.





ESPINO:

So your mom came here, but she had no family back in Mexico?





BECERRA:

She had her sister, one surviving sister, and that was it. And she had cousins. My cousin Miguel García, the attorney, his mom was cousins with my mom. I guess that’s why we’re primos.





ESPINO:

Oh, wow. So then this Puerto Rican family, they were not living in Orange County. They were living originally in—





BECERRA:

In L.A., Watts, yeah.





ESPINO:

—in the Watts area. And the house that you lived in, were you living with them or were you living—





BECERRA:

They had a unit in the back of their house that they rented. It wasn’t a garage, because the garage was over here. It was like a big—it was the size of a double garage, but it wasn’t the garage. A double garage was next to that room.





ESPINO:

And they became like your family.





BECERRA:

Yeah, oh, yes. [laughs] Yes, so I had a bunch of Puerto Rican cousins. So growing up, you know, it was the same. Puerto Ricans and Mexicans were the same. They were my family. There wasn’t any difference at all.





ESPINO:

What about, like, culturally, though? I’m thinking different foods and different [unclear].





BECERRA:

Yes, but what happened, Mamatita, the couple, the abuelitos, my Puerto Rican abuelitos, would be Felipe and Teresita, and Teresita was Mamatita to me. She taught my ma how to cook Puerto Rican food. My mom made the best arroz con pollo in the world. You can’t even go to any restaurant and find as good as my mom had learned to make, because my mom was a really, really good cook. I mean, people got married, they sent their brides to my ma’s house and teach them how to cook because she cooked so, so good.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

So when she cooked Puerto Rican food, it was the best.





ESPINO:

Do you remember what it was like, how her arroz con pollo was different from other—





BECERRA:

Yes, the spices. She used the same spices, but being a Mexican, she made the spice a little bit stronger, maybe a little bit more comino, which is, I think, what it probably was, and then something that made everything yellow.





ESPINO:

Safron? The safron they use in paella?



0:12:17

BECERRA:

I’m not a cook. [laughs] I don’t know, but it was so good. It was really good. Nobody, not even Puerto Ricans, can make it that good. [laughs] At least [unclear], it was so good.

So, yeah, the other thing, too, was my father would laugh because he used to sing Puerto Rican songs, you know, and he would sing to her growing up because he remembered them from when we lived there. They were like more campesino-type Puerto Rican, but it wasn’t like New York Puerto Rican. It was like the island Puerto Rico, because these Puerto Ricans were campesinos and they were used to working in the fields. And, well, look, the [unclear], they were on a farm, right? My Tío M____ went with my dad to pick oranges in the Valley, maybe here. I’m not sure exactly where they went to pick them, but I know they went to pick oranges, and my mom went, too, because they sent her to live with—my mom’s sister had moved to Tijuana, so we went to live with them for about six months when they went to pick fruit.





ESPINO:

On a regular basis? Just a one-time basis?





BECERRA:

Just one time, just one time. So we lived in Tijuana. Me and my brother and my sister lived in Tijuana with my aunt for about six months. And my Uncle Benito, he was a blacksmith. In the old days, when you crossed the border to Mexico, there was a big sign, an iron sign above the border. It said "Mexico." He made that sign because a blacksmith—and then when they built the [unclear] thing there, the big [unclear] they had there for [unclear], he built two of the doors there for [unclear] because that’s what he did, was a blacksmith.





ESPINO:

Wow. You have a lot of well-known famous connections somehow or another. So how long did you live there? Did you go to school in that area?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

That’s the famous Miramonte Elementary School District right where that school [unclear].





BECERRA:

I was, like, four years old when we moved out of there. My dad bought a house in an unincorporated area of L.A. County which was between Compton, Gardena, Athens. At the end of our block was El Segundo Boulevard, and El Segundo was the border between the city of L.A. and the county of L.A. and El Segundo was not paved. It was still a dirt road. Parts of it were paved and parts of it were dirt road. So, like, when we’d go to church and it was raining, we couldn’t take El Segundo. We had to go down to Rosecrans, take Rosecrans down to Willowbrook and go to church.





ESPINO:

You had a car?





BECERRA:

My dad did, yeah. He had these old, old cars, you know, because we were really poor. He had Model-As and Model-Ts, and we liked them because we like to sit in the back of the Model-A that goes back. We loved that. [laughs] But, yeah, we went to church down Rosecrans, but that part at the time was undeveloped. The street we lived on was unpaved, so no sidewalks, no pavement, no sewers, no sewer system.





ESPINO:

So you had an outhouse?





BECERRA:

We had an outhouse. And then my dad, even though he had no papers and spoke broken English, he got tired of digging those holes for the outhouse. [laughs] So he went to the county, he got a petition, had all the neighbors sign the petition, and took it down to the county so they would put in the sewer system. So we got the sewers in on our block. We still didn’t have paved streets, but we had the sewers first. Later on we got the paved streets.





ESPINO:

Wow. So what education level did your father have, do you know?





BECERRA:

He finished grammar school. He finished grammar school.





ESPINO:

In Mexico or—





BECERRA:

Mexico, yeah.





ESPINO:

How about your mom?





BECERRA:

Second grade, second grade in Mexico.





ESPINO:

Did you find them to be—because many people say that the education in Mexico, especially in those days, was superior to the U.S. form of education and that you might have come with a sixth-grade education, but that was like high school. Did you find your parents were literate and read and had books or newspapers?



0:17:21

BECERRA:

No. My dad was, you know, he was. My mom was intelligent, too, but she was not educated. Her [unclear] was different than my father’s, okay? My father was very aware of the Mexican Revolution, the purpose of the revolution, the principles of the revolution. Those things, you know, he was very, very partisan in that regard. My dad, for example, was not religious when he was in Mexico. He hated the Roman Catholic Church because he was very much aware of the history of Roman Catholicism from the time of the conquista to a time that Benito Juárez had to fight them, to the time of the Mexican Revolution. And my grandfather was the same way, okay?

When my mom got married, this woman who was the head of the Mexican [unclear], Juventud Católica, when Juventud Católica came to her house because she had just gotten married, she knew that my mom was going to come to the U.S., so she gave her, like, a list of, I don’t know, some rosaries to recite every day. She says, "Because, you know, your husband is not Catholic. He doesn’t go to church, and your father-in-law is even worse." My grandpa, I don’t think he has ever set foot in a Catholic church. And she says, "I think they’re Protestants," which they weren’t, you know, but she felt that they were Protestants, but they weren’t. But, you know, this was in 1944. Okay, twenty years earlier, Mexico was either—I always combine or—to me, Roman Catholicism in Mexico and backwardness go together, okay? I have a book written in 1923 by an American author, and he came to the same conclusion because he interviewed Calles before, when Calles was a general and Lázaro Cárdenas, when Lázaro Cárdenas was a general before they were presidents, right, and he talks about them in his book. And one thing he talked about was Roman Catholicism, and he describes a scene that he’s witnessed that—did you see that movie Borat? It’s about this guy, a Muslim from Kazakhstan. It was a comedy. Borat.





ESPINO:

No.





BECERRA:

You didn’t see it?





ESPINO:

No.





BECERRA:

The opening scene, it could have come right out of Mexico.





ESPINO:

Oh, really?



0:20:15

BECERRA:

Yes. When I saw it I was, like, shocked. I couldn’t stop laughing because it was—people see it and they think these are Muslims. They don’t see it that those are Mexican Catholics as well. In that scene, these [unclear] in Kazakhstan are going up the street and they have a Jew that they’re hanging, and everybody’s throwing rocks at the Jew, you know, "Kill the Jew," right? And what’s funny is that in this book written in 1923, Mexicans did the same thing. That Jew was supposed to be Judas, right, and so they hung Judas in effigy and they walked through the center of town with Judas hanging and they’d be throwing rocks, "Kill the Jew," right? So the author went and asked these people that were there, these Mexicans, "Do you know what a Jew looks like?" "No." "Have you ever seen one?" "No." "What do you think they look like?"

"Oh, they have horns, they have tails, and they have hooved feet." These were Jews, I mean, and, you know, these people had never seen a Jew. The only idea they had of Jews was what Roman Catholicism taught them. Nobody else is going to teach them this except Catholics, the Catholic Church. So that’s one of the reasons I always associate backwardness with Roman Catholicism in Mexico and I don’t think it’s changed at all. I mean, I saw that movie El Crimen del Padre Amaro, and you see how those church [unclear], they’re throwing rocks at the newspaper, the reporter’s father, and the father’s very agnostic. He hasn’t got time for that nonsense of Roman Catholicism, right? That was my dad and that was my grandfather.





ESPINO:

How did they pass those ideas down to you? Did they talk to you directly or did you just overhear them grumbling or how did you [unclear] that way?





BECERRA:

They taught me. My father—my mama didn’t. My mama was very, very Catholic when—I mean those were roles. She was a Mexican woman in the old days, right? That was her role. You know, with the exception of the Mexican Revolution, women—we’re talking about not all women were like that. Most of them were not. So it was my dad. My dad would tell me those things. He told me, "Mijo, when I was in school, we had [unclear]." They had a name for the people who carried out the agrarian reform. Those revolutionaries would come to the schools and teach them, agraristas. I forget what they were called. And he says, "They taught us about the three-headed serpent that ruled Mexico. He’s a three-headed serpent and [unclear] los ricos and el ejército, y la iglesia." That’s the three-headed monster that ruled Mexico. So, no, from the time I could understand, he taught me that.





ESPINO:

Wow. Was he involved in any activities? Like, did he channel his ideas into any organization?





BECERRA:

No. What happens, my dad was—I never saw my dad drink in my life, you know, but he had been an alcoholic. He was an alcoholic. He was a drunk.





ESPINO:

But you never saw him drink?



0:24:480:25:45

BECERRA:

No, because by the time I was born, he changed. My grandfather told him, "You better get married. You’re going to be thirty pretty soon. Look at you. All you do is get drunk." So he said, "Okay." So he got married and he still got drunk, right? So my mom would have to go down—she’d take the bus, the little streetcar down to Wilmington to a restaurant that’s still on Pacific Coast Highway, and she’d go down there because she knew that was a bar he would go hang out in. It was a restaurant/bar. Then she would take his check on Fridays because if she didn’t, he would spend it all, all right? So she would go take his money, you know, so he wouldn’t blow it. But my dad, he wound up in a situation where somebody in the family was going to go shoot somebody, and my dad thought, "Shit, I got three kids. What am I doing?" So he told this person, "You know what? Let me off right here." And from that point on, my dad says, "That’s it. I can’t do this anymore."

So that’s when—my mom had already converted from Roman Catholicism to the Pentecostal Church, okay, so then my dad did the same thing. So once you become a Pentecostal, I mean, that—then my dad was like me. I should say I was like my father. My dad didn’t go into this thing, like, half-assed. Once he became a Pentecostal, that was it. That was his life. The church became like his life. He had his family life, his job, and the church. Any activities that would have been political, no. It was going to be the church. And that did not change his political views, you know. In fact, he took some of those views into the church with him and [unclear]. Well, at least in the Pentecostals and the Assemblies of God Pentecostal, every two years you have an election for who’s going to be the pastor. And so every pastor has a free election every two years, unless the church by however majority says, "No, we want this minister to be here forever," the permanent minister.

So my father always opposed it, and when the annual election and the minister was elected for life, my dad quit the church, even though he loved the pastor. It was his best friend, you know, he loved him, but he said, "But this goes against my principles. I don’t believe in this." And he got that from his attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church, you know, that it was autocratic, not democratic. And so he just, "There’s no way I can accept that," so he left. So for a while we would go to church with Free Methodists. We didn’t go to the Pentecostal Church because my dad didn’t want to be in that situation because he knew people from the other congregations, because they were in the same religion that we were. They were Assemblies of God Church also. So he said, "No. If I go there, they’re going to start talking about what happened. I don’t want any gossiping about what happened in that particular church and all that."

So we went to the Free Methodist Church, and we attended there for a couple of years. Then what happened is that a few years later, exactly what my father told was going to happen happened. The people got tired of the minister and worked to get rid of the minister. You had to go through a special process, which meant that the church had to put the minister on trial and show that he was unfit to be a minister, and they did. The congregation who were his flock, the people he guided, just virtually turned on him, and he was removed as pastor.

So he was heartbroken and felt betrayed or heartbroken and he left. He left the church and set up another church, okay, which is very successful because that church that he started, his son took over, and the church now has three thousand members, not because of the father, but because the son. The son became very prominent. His son hung out, by the way, with the Brown Berets at the Piranya Coffeehouse, and then, you know, he was taking acid and got [unclear]. And he decided to go to the ministry, well, you know, which is cool because he wasn’t into drugs and he was—so he went into ministry. He went to Harvard and graduated with a degree in theology. He’s got his Ph.D. in theology. He was the president of the Latin American Bible Institute in La Puente. He was a professor at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena and he’s got a 3,000-member congregation over there.





ESPINO:

We’re talking the Mexican American church or Latino?





BECERRA:

All Mexicans, all Mexicans. Well, actually now it would be Latino, all Latinos.





ESPINO:

But back then when you were going—





BECERRA:

Back then it was all Mexican, yeah.





ESPINO:

And the minister that you’re talking about was also Mexican?





BECERRA:

Yes, from Durango.





ESPINO:

Was it a Spanish-speaking congregation?





BECERRA:

The congregation was always Spanish-speaking, always.





ESPINO:

But I mean they would give the service in Spanish?





BECERRA:

Yes. Nobody spoke English. [laughs] It had to be in Spanish. Nobody spoke English, you know, or if they did, it was very limited or it was very—see, they had at some point Assemblies of God decided to carry out their mission among the Spanish-speaking, and this one sister named Lucy, Sister Lucy, came from England and she started the ministry of Assemblies of God with the Pentecostals, with their outreach to the Mexicans. And, of course, it was going to be segregated because by then the church was segregated. Remember, the Pentecostal Movement started in L.A., downtown L.A., in 1906. It was started by an African American minister and [unclear] ten years ago, I think.





ESPINO:

I don’t know anything about this history.





BECERRA:

See, this is funny, because there was this white guy at work before I retired and he’s an Assemblies of God Pentecostal, a conservative, social conservative, a Republican, and I told him that I picked up this book that my dad had, and it was about—oh, fuck, I forget what the name of it was, but it had to do with the roots of the Spanish-speaking Pentecostal Church in the United States, and they talk about how the people thought it, and I knew them because it was new. It was new. I knew the founders, the Mexican founders of the church.





ESPINO:

It’s that recent, the founding of the—



0:30:46

BECERRA:

1940s, 1940. So by then I knew them. I knew them because, you know, when you figure somebody starts their ministry in the 1940s, 1960s, you know, that’s no time at all, you know, so I knew them. But anyways, going back to the church, my dad went back to the church once the minister was gone. [unclear] the minister, and the minister was in tears, what had happened to him. And my dad said, "I knew that was going to happen and I didn’t want to be a part of that. You’re my brother. There’s no way I would be a part of that. I had to leave because I knew what was going to happen."

And what’s interesting, a lot of the things that I saw at that church, the fundamentalism, the religious fundamentalism to a point of fanaticism. What happens when that church—everything becomes really internal where everything is done inside the church, very little outreach, and because they’re very sectarian, they pretty much a sect. All of those characteristics that I saw in that church, later I would see it in the Communist Movement and I would recognize it right away. I’d have to wait for [unclear]—I could see it, you know, because of the experience I had with that church. The fundamentalism, the lack—I’ll talk about that later, but I would see all of those characteristics.

And then you would see international, what happened in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge. Why did they become the criminals they became? What drives them to that? What are those kinds of—why is it? Because I would think about that and I would relate it all the way back to that church, what I learned in that church.





ESPINO:

You wouldn’t relate it back to the lessons your father taught you about the Roman Catholic Church?





BECERRA:

No. No, because the Roman Catholic Church was different. The lessons I learned from my dad—





ESPINO:

Well, it sounds like he gave you some critical thinking. I’m sorry. I interrupted you. [laughter] The lessons you learned from your dad, yes. You can go ahead, finish your—



0:32:260:33:35

BECERRA:

Yeah, he did. He did. The things that my dad taught me was, one—let me give an example. One time—well, two examples. One is the theory of evolution. The Assemblies of God Pentecostals do not believe in the theory of evolution, okay? My dad did, and my dad told me, "Look, Cruz, there’s no contradiction between the Book of Exodus and the theory of evolution. There’s no contradictions." He says, "In the Bible, it says that—." [unclear] something else. [cries] [unclear] something else. But he said, "Look," he said, "for God, one day can be a thousand years." He says, "You know, it could be a billion years. So there’s no contradiction," he says. That was one.

And I would say to this minister, because every Sunday the ministers would come to preach. It was, like, a guest preacher, and this one minister was giving a sermon. I was listening to it, and it got to a point where some of the experiences that he had, and I heard it. I said, "That was bullshit. I can’t believe this." And I looked at my brother, and he looked at me too. We were sitting in the back row, because at that time we all went to church because all of our parents forced us to go, so in the back row, all the young guys, you know. We weren’t cholos, okay, but we were all dressed like cholos because if you were from the South Side in Compton and you were Chicano, everybody wore khakis. Yeah, but that was just the way you dressed, Sir Guy shirts, French toes. That’s just because you were a Chicano, not because you were a cholo.

So we’re in the back and we looked at each other and said, "This guy’s lying." So on the way back, driving back home, my mom scolded us for speaking and making a ruckus in the back row of the church in the middle of a sermon. "Mom, the guy says something I don’t believe. How am I going to believe something like this?" He had something that he had this vision of fire and all kinds of stuff. And I said, "I can’t believe that kind of stuff."

And she says, "But he’s a minister. He’s a servant of God. He’s preaching the word of God." My dad interrupted her and says, "No." He says, "Sometimes somebody gets up there, they’re going to get carried away, and you just can’t accept everything somebody else tells you, even if he’s a minister, even from our religion. No." And I thought, "Good." You know, so respect your father and you respect your father for that.





ESPINO:

Well, that’s what I’m talking about. As far as the critical thinking, maybe you didn’t call it that, but he was teaching you how to look at things with a critical eye and not just to swallow. But that makes it interesting that he would even dedicate his life to the Pentecostal Church when he had those views about the Catholic Church. How was that not different for him? I don’t know if he ever talked to you about that.



0:35:30

BECERRA:

Sure. One is, okay, going to ABCs. One is the democracy of the Pentecostal Church as opposed to the autocracy of Roman Catholicism, okay? His principles, you know, the Mexican Revolution was for democracy and against the autocracy of the dictatorship of Porfiro Diaz or the ruling class in Mexico. That was one. The other thing is that in the old days, in the church, people didn’t read the Bible, and in the Pentecostal Church you read it and you studied it and you interpreted it. Okay, now, true, the Pentecostals have one particular way of interpreting it, right, and so my father accepted that, but not like a fanatic, obviously, because he wasn’t a fanatic. He was very dedicated, but he always said, like, he didn’t totally abandon reason, okay? And so there was that aspect.

The only other thing was this, that Roman Catholicism was very impersonal to him. It was a very impersonal religion, whereas with the Pentecostal Church it was more of a personal relationship that wanted to establish this with God. There’s nobody in between, all right, so he prayed directly to God. He didn’t go through the communion of the saints and all that other stuff, right, because to him the idea of the saints and the Virgin Mary, all that to my dad was idolatry, okay, which I agree with him. I said, "It’s nothing else but idolatry." And he said, "Mijo, when the Spanish came, they [unclear], ‘Why? What’s the difference? Your gods are white and ours are brown. What’s the difference?’ They try to bullshit you, ‘No, these are saints. They intercede for you.’" Said, "Well, you know, you can say whatever you want, you know, but," my dad says, "but idols are idols. You pray to an idol or you don’t pray to an idol." He says, "And if you’re saying [unclear], doesn’t matter, that’s idolatry, and it doesn’t matter [unclear] was before the Spanish came," he says. So that’s the other reason he could not accept that from Roman Catholicism was that he really considered idolatry. And so, yeah, those were differences that he saw.





ESPINO:

So he didn’t have that viewpoint, that Marxist viewpoint of religion being the opiate of the—his critique of the Catholic Church was different than that kind of critique?





BECERRA:

No, his critique, it was political, the same way. It was also political. His original critique of Roman Catholicism was political, the role they played in Mexico, okay, and stifling the masses of the people, you know, [unclear], instilling backwardness and forcing the rule of los ricos. That was it, and the dictatorship and the church’s role in that, so his criticism was political. It wasn’t religious until after he became religious, and then he was really critical. Most of my family on my dad’s side became Protestants. Not everybody, okay, but most of his family did.





ESPINO:

Did your mom—was she the catalyst for all that? She’s the one who converted first?





BECERRA:

She converted first.





ESPINO:

Before anybody else in your family?





BECERRA:

Before anybody else, yes.





ESPINO:

Did she ever tell you how that happened or do you know how and why?





BECERRA:

I think what happened, it was through the Puerto Ricans. First of all, it was through the Puerto Rican family we were with.





ESPINO:

They were Pentecostals?



0:39:17

BECERRA:

Yes, they were Pentecostal. And what happens, first I’m born, right? So my mom, being Catholic, she was trying to find a priest to have me baptized. And so one of my aunts told my dad that my mom was looking for a priest to baptize me, and my dad blew it. He was not a Protestant, he was just not a Catholic, and my dad blew it. And says—I remember his quote—"Ningún alfaldado va tentar a mi hijo." [laughs] No skirt-wearing guy was going to touch his son, right? "Ningún alfaldado va a tocar a mi hijo." He was very, very strong about that.

So, no, my mom, through her contact with the Puerto Rican family that we lived with, then they invited her to go to church, and then she converted to the Pentecostal Church, and then my dad followed. You’d think it would be the other way around, but, no, it was this way. [laughs] My dad followed [unclear].





ESPINO:

So she started going and then she converted. Did she ever talk to you about what it gave her that was different? I mean, she was a very strict Catholic. That must have been a hard conversion.



0:41:20

BECERRA:

No, I think that—in fact, I [unclear]. He was going to be writing a book about that, about the role of the Pentecostal Church and its relationship with immigrants. I think what happened really was that she was in this country and isolated from her home, right? My dad’s family was not the most warming, welcoming to her, right, those who were here, okay, because some were still in Mexico, some would come later. And then the people that she was the closest to were the Puerto Ricans, the Puerto Rican family that we lived with and the extended family, you know, Blas, Fela, Cristina, there was a bunch.

Tía Fela was the one that was—there was, I think, four sisters and two brothers, okay. Blas and Miro and then Tía Fela from [unclear], her sister Cristina. I forget the other one’s names. But these were the people that were around her, you know, the people that she associated with, socialized with, talked with all the time. Because she had no car, she had no way to travel, she had no place to go or any way to get there, except to get to Wilmington [unclear]. But she’d get to Wilmington and take my daddy’s check before he spent it at the bar, right?

And so this is how she got invited to the church. So then she goes to church and then she sees a community of people who help each other, work with each other, assist each other, work together, and is very social, right? And so then she becomes a part of that group and it’s very inviting. There’s nobody else. And so, you know, they say that there’s a—I mean, the evangelist said it, when there’s an intersection of a need and a message, that’s when the conversion takes place, and that’s what happened there, the message and what she saw and the need for her to be able to have a spiritual life, because that was her.





ESPINO:

And your father was not supporting her involvement in the Catholic Church either?





BECERRA:

Oh, no, no. [laughs]





ESPINO:

It sounds like she didn’t have a choice.





BECERRA:

No, no. So she converted, and then my dad followed.





ESPINO:

So he was still drinking then when you were born?





BECERRA:

Oh, yeah.





ESPINO:

Do you know how that stopped?





BECERRA:

Yes, when he converted, he stopped smoking and drinking, like that [snaps fingers]. That became part of the conversion.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

Just like that [snaps fingers]. No drinking, no smoking.





ESPINO:

How old were you, do you remember?





BECERRA:

No, but I must have been three years old, maybe.





ESPINO:

So do you remember anything about that neighborhood? Do you remember the ethnic makeup? I mean, you mentioned that the streets were unpaved and that you had an outhouse, but do you remember anything else from that first neighborhood that you lived in? I know you were four when you moved, so you were—the first neighborhood where you lived with the M_____. They weren’t M_____.





BECERRA:

No. Gomez. No, no, that was different. That was already developed. No, when I was four years old, we moved to L.A. County, but where I was born till I was maybe three, four years old, that was Watts. That was already developed.





ESPINO:

Oh, Watts was developed?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes, very much so.





ESPINO:

So that first house that you lived in, in the back of the Puerto Rican family, that was developed?





BECERRA:

Oh, yes.





ESPINO:

Oh, okay. So then when you moved out to the L.A. County area, that—





BECERRA:

That was undeveloped.





ESPINO:

Okay. But is there anything that you remember about that first neighborhood in Watts?





BECERRA:

No, because I just remember the house that we lived in, and they had one of those ponds in the back where you have these big goldfish, the big fish, right, big goldfish with the little bridge over the pond and the fish are swimming around, the goldfish.





ESPINO:

Like a Japanese garden?



0:44:52

BECERRA:

Yes, like that, and they were swimming around it. I always liked to go look at them, you know, and it was really fascinating. It was really nice. I’ve seen it now. It’s not nice anymore. I mean, it’s not run down either. The people that have the house, they remember the Puerto Rican owners because I think maybe they bought from the Puerto Rican owners, but they remembered the people who lived there before, the Puerto Rican family. Because I went there last year because I was in the neighborhood, so I decided to drive by, see if I could find the house. I found it, again, because I’d passed by before. And I was looking at it, and this elderly couple, African American elderly couple, the man comes out. He says, "Can I help you? Looking for something?" So I explained to him who I was, I lived there. He says, "Yeah." So he called his wife over and he starts talking with me, right? And I told him, "Well, you remember that little couple, that little Puerto Ricans lived here?"

"Yeah. Oh, yeah. He remembers them!" he tells his wife. I have pictures, you know, of that time when I was on a tricycle. I was, like, three years old on a tricycle and I have pictures of that, but that’s all I remember because I couldn’t go up and down the street. I just remember just the house, okay, but as far as having [unclear], no, that didn’t happen till I moved to Compton, to the unincorporated area of L.A. That’s when I started noticing, playing on a bicycle and tricycle and, you know, the little red wagon and all that.





ESPINO:

And that’s where you went to school?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

You went to the public school?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes.





ESPINO:

Was there a school associated with the Pentecostal Church?





BECERRA:

No, not that I know of.





ESPINO:

So what school did you go to and do you have any memories from that experience, the elementary school?





BECERRA:

Yes, a lot, a lot, because, you know, we were really, really poor, but it was a country type of poor. So, like, today you’re poor if you don’t have videogames and stuff like that. In those days, if you lived in the country, you don’t even think that way. When it rained, there was a park a block away, it flooded and when it flooded it was a big pond, right? And that big pond would be full of frogs, pollywogs, tadpoles. Those were our toys. We’d go down there and play with them. We’d build rafts and go across the pond on your raft with sticks, you know, pushing them across, those kinds of things. So we had adventures that city kids never had, you know.

A block away, too, was a dairy with sheep, goats, horses, cows and stuff, and we’d go down there and play with them. When the cows would go eat, we’d be petting them on their heads, you know, and those were our pets, right? It wasn’t like you didn’t have anything or were bored at all. There was construction around the neighborhood, too, because it was unincorporated. It was hardly any houses, so there was always somebody’s building houses. So there were places there to go play also with the wood, and we’d bring the wood home. There’s things that I remember, memories about that time. My mom denied it later because she was embarrassed, you know, that she would have a wood stove, but we would bring the wood home and would burn it, and she was embarrassed that she would have a metate.





ESPINO:

Wash the laundry?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

To cook, to make the—





BECERRA:

To grind the corn. [unclear] a stick like this, right? And she was never embarrassed about the molcajete, that was fine, but the metate, she’d be embarrassed about that, that we would burn wood in the stove.





ESPINO:

But you didn’t grow your own corn. Did you grow your own corn?





BECERRA:

No, no. And we didn’t have—the gas wasn’t piped in yet. We had electricity. The gas came in afterwards and then the sewers, but we had electricity. That came in right away.





ESPINO:

But your parents owned the house?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes.





ESPINO:

So it’s a really interesting kind of poverty, because they owned the house. They weren’t renting.





BECERRA:

No, my dad bought the house for $3,500, okay, because he got it and he wanted to move in, and the house was not finished. When we moved in, the house was not finished. Only the outside was finished. On the inside it wasn’t. The plumbing wasn’t finished. My dad said, "I’ll finish it." I mean, the walls were, like, two-by-fours. My dad said, "No, I want to move in. I’ve got an opportunity to buy the house. I’m going to buy it now. I’ll finish the house myself," so that’s what he did. He put in the floors, because they were cement, so put in the hardwood floors. He did all that stuff. He plastered. He couldn’t do the plaster, but he was able to put the drywall before the plaster. He did stuff like that, but he finished it, so he got it like that and he finished it himself.





ESPINO:

Wow. So then he would go to work. And would he spend weekends and the afternoons working on your home?





BECERRA:

Yes. And then because my dad worked in the garment industry, so he only worked, like, six to nine months a year. So he had time to work on the house when he wasn’t at work. Of course, sometimes he said, "Well, when I’m working, I’ve got the money but I don’t have the time, and when I’ve got the time because I’m laid off, I don’t have the money. So it’s going to take a while," which it did. It took a while to finish the house.





ESPINO:

Did you help him, you and your—





BECERRA:

No, we were kids. We didn’t know it was hard work. We watched, "Wow, Dad!" But it was hard work, really hard work, especially putting in the floor.





ESPINO:

So how did they divide the responsibilities of raising you and maintaining the home, your parents?





BECERRA:

My mom didn’t work. My mom didn’t work. She was at home.





ESPINO:

But I mean what kind of work did she do in the home? For example, did she help your dad with the construction? I mean, did she have specific this is what the mom does and this is what the dad does?





BECERRA:

Yes, she took care of us. We were three, and she took care of us, the three kids, and she took care of the house.





ESPINO:

Like cooking and laundry and cleaning?





BECERRA:

All the cooking, all the laundry, yes.





ESPINO:

So can you describe, for example, like, a typical dinner? Would it be something where your father would sit down and your mom would serve everybody? Was it that kind of a family life?



0:53:250:55:26

BECERRA:

Yes, yes. That’s one thing. We all had to sit down for dinner. Sometimes when my dad came in late, we’d eat, and then my dad would eat when he came in. But, yes, she would cook for everybody. And we had chickens in the back, so we always had eggs. And if we had company, you know, there goes one chicken on Sundays, right? [laughs] But we had chickens and the rooster in the back of the house. But, yeah, then she took care of the chickens. We did, too, we did that when we were bigger.

But that’s how those things were divided, and then she also would give us the religious upbringing. She would talk to us, make us pray, and all that kind of stuff, right, which that really didn’t impress us, okay. That is not what impressed us about my mom. What impressed us fundamentally and the real impact she had on us, it was religious, but it wasn’t the preaching or the praying. It was what she did, you know. Her Christianity, it’s funny because, you know, these are the things that you learn when you’re a kid and then you learn from it later on. You know, the Pentecostal Church, say, ten years ago, twenty years ago, hated illegal aliens, hated them, wanted them all deported, right?

In the church I had a friend. He was my ex-brother-in-law from my first wife. He became a Pentecostal. After being a hippie on acid, he became a Pentecostal. He would go to church, all white. He was, like, the only Mexican in the church. Everybody there was for Proposition 187. He was against it. You go to a Mexican or Latino church, everybody there opposed Proposition 187 and would pray that it would be voted down. In the white church, they would pray for it to pass because these people were a threat, right? Same religion, same doctrine, same everything, you know, but a totally different world view. And later on I would see how Communists were the same way, same way, all right, no difference. And I learned that from the church.

My mom was, like, what I would call a Christian, real Christian. I think it’s the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew is where Jesus talks about, like, on the judgment day that the nations shall come for judgment, and that the Lord will separate the sheep from the goats, and that becomes like a fundamental aspect of Christianity. And that was my mom, okay? And there that’s where it says that the Lord separates the sheep from the goats and he deals first with the sheep and he blesses them. He says, "Look, when I was hungry, you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, and I was in jail, I was sick, I was homeless." And then he says, "You’re going to heaven. You guys were a bunch of assholes, because I was hungry, you didn’t feed me, and I got thirsty, you didn’t give me to drink," and all that. Well, my mom was clearly on the side of the sheep. That’s where she raised us, you know, and those were her values. I didn’t care about if there’s a heaven or a hell, you know, couldn’t give a shit about that, but the values, those were important. That’s what she raised us with, you know, really, really raised us with.

One time this one minister had gone to Tijuana, outside of Tijuana, and seen a lot of poverty back in the fifties, and he came back and he wanted to start an orphanage. So I told my mom. So Mom says, "Well, all I’ve got right now is a quarter. That’s how you start." Says, "Now we’re going to start raising money to build the orphanage," so they did. So after it was built [unclear], my mom went to visit and she says, "Look, the roof, we have to finish the roof because the rainy season’s going to come and all these kids are going to get wet." So my mom came back. She says, "We’ve got to raise money for that," and she did. She said [unclear] for what I did, "Fue a la iglesia de los puertorriqueños. Con los puertorriqueños hicimos cenas." She says in two weeks they raised $1,000, in two weeks, selling dinners. But it’s funny, she went to the Puerto Rican church to do it. She didn’t go to the Mexican church, she went to the Puerto Rican churches, and they raised the money.





ESPINO:

You don’t know why she would—I mean, what would be the difference?





BECERRA:

That’s the way Mom was. My mom was friendly with everybody. She loved everybody and she identified just as strongly, just like me, just as strongly with Puerto Ricans as with Mexicans. To me, there wasn’t any difference. Yeah, the Puerto Ricans, they talked differently, they talked faster than we did, you know, and she had her criticisms of Puerto Ricans, not as people, but really had to do like a class thing. We would have dinner at the Puerto Ricans’, and everybody would be talking at the same time at the dinner table. So at our dinner table, if we started arguing back and forth, everybody’s talking, "¡Cállense! Parecen puertorriqueños." [laughter] That was my mom, all right? But, no, she had just as strong an identity with Puerto Ricans as she did with Mexicans, so she would go there.





ESPINO:

How old was she then when she—because I’m imagining her maybe being under twenty when she first married your father and moved to—





BECERRA:

No, no. When she married my dad—let me see. No, she was then about twenty-six.





ESPINO:

She was that old?





BECERRA:

Twenty-six, twenty-seven years old.





ESPINO:

Ah, she was already—



0:58:36

BECERRA:

She’s been with my dad nine years as a girlfriend. I said, "Damn, Mama, that’s a long time." She says, "Well, I broke up with him one time." "But that was nine years." She says, "Yeah, well, you know, I was getting tired of waiting for him. You know, if I wasn’t going to marry him, I was going to move to Guadalajara, from [unclear] to Guadalajara." She said, "I’d go work somebody’s house. I said to hell with it.’"

But she said finally he decided to get married. But, see, my dad was really irresponsible, just drinking, and he just loved to drink and stuff like that, so that’s why my grandfather got on his ass, told him, "You’d better get married. Your whole life, you’re going to live like that?" So I think she was twenty-six when she got married.





ESPINO:

That’s not young. That’s pretty old for those times.





BECERRA:

For those times, yes. Yes.





ESPINO:

Because I imagined somebody who kind of grows up here as a wife, as a mother, but she was already a grown woman when she started having kids and meeting the Puerto Rican family. Was she always involved in that kind of work, that kind of—I don’t want to call it charity, but helping others?



1:00:301:02:08

BECERRA:

Yes. Let me tell you. This is why sometimes when they have these debates about immigration, I’m, like, from another world. Because I listen sometimes to the debates. Even the progressives, like MSNBC, the only guy that comes close to it would be Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC because he’s Irish and he understands immigration, right, and maybe Jews to a certain extent, but not to a great extent, Jews. But when I was growing up, when we were kids, a lot of people from Pueblo—Pueblo is a small port, six thousand people, small town in [unclear], people would come to our house and they would stay and then they would move on. They had to have someplace donde llegar, and it was sort of like an underground railroad. They would come to our house, stay there, any [unclear].

They would know somebody who knew somebody who knew my parents, so they would wind up at my parents’ house for a day or two and then move on in order to pick fruit or whatever they were going to do. So that happened all the time, people that were relatives and people that were not relatives, or distant relatives. So growing up, we always had people that stayed at our house. As poor as it was, as unfinished as it was, it didn’t matter. That’s where people stayed and then they would move on to another place to live. That was the norm, that people didn’t have immigration papers, and so when somebody starts talking about that, it’s like, what are you talking about? [laughs]

It’s like Luis Valdez’s play, you know, "We don’t need no stinkin’ badges." And so when I think about it, if we’re in the Berets or after, we’d say, "Hey, you know, we didn’t put the border there. We don’t respect the border," stuff like that, you know, or a lot of different indigenous viewpoints of the indigenous movement. But really, to me, it was just the way that I grew up. The people had the right to be here, they had a right to go to work. They didn’t need anybody’s permission. This is just the way it was. We need to work, we come here, we work. That’s it. There was no reason to find legal justification for it, to justify it. You come here because you’re going to work. You’re going to bring your family or you’re going to go back to your family, whatever it is, and that’s just the way it is.

So when people start putting obstacles to that, then what? [laughs] It’s like a totally different world, makes absolutely no sense, like, trying to rationalize it legally like some of the Hispanic organizations do, trying to make arguments for it. I have a hard time with that because in my mind, growing up, I never had to make an argument for it. That’s just the way it is. You come here, period. You don’t have to have an excuse. You just come.





ESPINO:

Did your parents ever talk about why they left and what brought them here?





BECERRA:

Yeah, my dad told me. My dad was born in 1916 during the Mexican Revolution. The country was ravaged by the revolution. During the 1920s it was still a disaster area. 1930s is the Great Depression, okay, and Mexico didn’t have that economic engine, the manufacturing base to pull out of it or World War II to pull out of it, so it stayed in a depression during the forties. So my dad, he said, "I wasn’t going to have a family and raise you like that. We’re poor." I’ve seen pictures that he showed us when they were young, all the kids, they’re poor, I mean really, really poor. I’ve seen other pictures where nobody’s wearing shoes. It was really country, really poverty, really Depression era, and it didn’t change. So he said he was not going to raise his kids like that. He was going to come here, and that’s why. That’s why he came.





ESPINO:

And you said that they were both without papers.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And they were always afraid of being caught and deported. What did they do? Did they just stay close to home or how did they live their lives in order to [unclear]?





BECERRA:

We were aware of it and it bothered us, but we lived in a children’s world. But the only thing my dad did, my mom did, was they worked, they went shopping, and they went to church. That was their life. That was it.





ESPINO:

They didn’t travel back and forth to another state? Like vacations, did you ever take any trips?



1:06:08

BECERRA:

No, the vacations that we took, the trips that we took were to Tijuana to visit my aunt and my cousins. And it’s funny because my dad had his Green Card, right, based on, one, his illegal papers, and, two, when he came in 1944, papers or no papers, you got drafted, so he was in the army. In 1944 he was drafted. So we would travel back and forth to Tijuana, even though he was undocumented with the Green Card that he had. One time he was laughing, he says, "You know what? One time they stopped me at the border and they said, ‘Mr. Olmeda, somebody is running around the country with your Green Card. Were you aware of that?’ ‘No!’" [laughter] It was my dad, right? But later on he fixed it, right? But we’d go down there to travel. In Tijuana, we’d go to the hot mineral springs [unclear]. We’d go to the beach, the hot mineral springs. My uncle would take me to the dog races. That’s the only time I’ve ever been to a dog race, was with my uncle. So we did things like that, you know, but it was all in Tijuana.

The first time I ever ate birria was a street vendor in Tijuana. It was a little cart and he was selling birria. My dad went crazy because birria is from Jalisco, originating in Jalisco. So, I mean, the three things Jalisco gives to the world, right: mariachi, tequila, and birria. So he wanted us to know what it was. He goes, "Eat all you want, all the tacos you want." So we did, 5 cents a taco. That was a long time ago. [laughs] So we just stuffed ourselves with birria, and that’s when he introduced us to that part of Jalisco culture. Now everybody eats it, but it’s from Jalisco. But, no, that’s where we would go, those areas.





ESPINO:

And your mom didn’t need—well, she had her fake papers. Are you saying she had her fake papers to get—





BECERRA:

Yes, because she was married to my dad. Yes.





ESPINO:

And your dad joined the army or your dad was drafted?





BECERRA:

He was drafted.





ESPINO:

He must have had to register. He was drafted under the other name?





BECERRA:

Under the other name.





ESPINO:

And also he couldn’t get his papers because he wasn’t using his real name?





BECERRA:

No, not till later on. He decided to go ahead and get it done.





ESPINO:

And you were born while he was in the military, then?





BECERRA:

Yes, my mom used to get her check. She told me she’d get her government check for me and for her because he was in the—because I was born while he was in the military.





ESPINO:

Where was he? Was he stationed here locally?





BECERRA:

Yeah, here. He was stationed locally.





ESPINO:

Because she would have been pregnant when he was in the service.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

He never went abroad?





BECERRA:

No. He was in a unit that was only for people who spoke no English. He wasn’t the only one. There were other Mexicans and other Italians maybe. Other people spoke no English, not just Mexican, mostly Mexican. It was not just Mexicans.





ESPINO:

Wow. That’s interesting.





BECERRA:

He’s not the only one. One time, okay, Isaac, the preacher I told you about, his dad was undocumented and got drafted. The minister I was telling about earlier, a friend of my dad’s, he was undocumented. He got drafted. He legalized the status during World War II. He took his oath of citizenship in North Africa during World War II. He served in North Africa and in France, but he got his citizenship in North Africa. He was undocumented when he went in. Another friend of mine, Blanca, who was in the August 29th Movement—you know Jimmy Franco?





ESPINO:

I’ve heard his name. He writes a lot, doesn’t he?





BECERRA:

Yeah, he’s got his blog. It was his father-in-law. Blanca’s married to him. But one time we were at a birthday party, I think for Blanca, and her dad was there and he was drinking and stuff. So he brought out his army picture, and it was just like my dad’s army picture from World War II. He says "Mira aqui estoy! Y mas mojadito que la chingada!" So it wasn’t uncommon for an undocumented to be serving in World War II because at least within my own circle, I know three people.





ESPINO:

Yeah, but the difference is that your dad was serving under someone else’s name.





BECERRA:

Uh-huh.





ESPINO:

But some people, they can enlist. They don’t get drafted because there’s no record of them being here, so they can enlist and then become citizens. So I’m wondering about this minister.





BECERRA:

No, the minister was given a choice, because I talked to his son, and he was given a choice [unclear]. [laughs] It was like the Irish during the Civil War. He was given a choice, you know. "You can enlist or you can be deported. Which do you want?" He says, "I’ll enlist," so he enlisted. He was given a choice of deportation or enlistment in the army, so he figured, "Well, if I go in the army, I can legalize my status."





ESPINO:

So he wasn’t drafted under a different name. He enlisted his own name.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Wow. That’s so fascinating. I wonder how many people were drafted under someone else’s papers.





BECERRA:

I don’t know.





ESPINO:

Do you know where your parents got their papers from, those fake ones?





BECERRA:

Yes, he bought it from somebody else. He bought them, but whoever it was must have had more than one copy because they must have sold it twice. And once he got them, he wasted no time. He and my uncle, they came over right away.





ESPINO:

And that was after the repatriation.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Some people had been sent back and sold their name. They were going to stay in Mexico and sold their name to somebody who was going to come here.





BECERRA:

Yeah. I don’t know.





ESPINO:

I don’t know. So your education, was it primarily religious, or do you remember anything about the public school that you went to?





BECERRA:

Yes, I remember quite a bit. When I started school, my neighborhood was mostly poor white, Appalachian white, and a few Mexicans, but when I went to the school, it was different. It was going to be mostly African American. When African Americans moved into our neighborhood, the white people scattered. They left. So my neighborhood became mostly black and a few Mexicans. When I started kindergarten, I spoke no English, but I knew when they put your name on the—you had to identify your name. [unclear] on the board, I knew my name right away because I could read in Spanish from going to church. In church they sang hymns, and so everybody had a hymnal, and you sat there with your mom or your dad and you were reading the hymnal and singing the hymns. That’s how you learned to read. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Just like that?





BECERRA:

Just like that.





ESPINO:

Once a week?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

Or did you guys go to church more often?





BECERRA:

All the time.





ESPINO:

What do you mean, all the time?





BECERRA:

Okay, twice on Sunday and at least twice during the week.





ESPINO:

Wow, that’s a lot.





BECERRA:

Yes, that’s a lot.





ESPINO:

So by the time you were five and enrolled in kindergarten, you had already developed some reading skills.





BECERRA:

Yes, in Spanish [unclear].





ESPINO:

In Spanish.





BECERRA:

Yeah. English wasn’t that big of a deal by then.





ESPINO:

So did they treat you differently, as if you were smarter than the other kids? Did they give you some sort of—





BECERRA:

No, because I didn’t speak English, so I wasn’t smarter than other kids. [laughs] In first grade is when we started reading and that’s when it came easier.





ESPINO:

So how did it work as far as learning English? Was it total immersion? I can’t imagine they had bilingual teachers.





BECERRA:

No, it was immersion, but you’re five years old and, you know, everybody’s going to be different. It was total immersion, and I just merged right in with those [unclear], as far as I can remember. A year later, I’m in first grade and my brother is in kindergarten, and he hates school because he can’t understand English and he doesn’t know what they’re saying. So he would walk down the corridor over to my room, first grade, and he’d open the door, and I would have to walk him back to kindergarten and sit in kindergarten class with him so that he wouldn’t be alone, because he hated it. So every time he’d open the door—Mrs. Price was my teacher’s name—"Okay, Cruz, you’d better walk him back." So I’d walk him back and sit with him in kindergarten until he got used to it.





ESPINO:

And you missed your lessons.





BECERRA:

Yeah, because when I got back, she said, "Okay, class, let’s show Cruz the song we learned." So this is the song that they learned while I was gone. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Were you resentful of that?





BECERRA:

No, not at all. That’s my little brother. I wasn’t resentful, no, no, not at all. And by then I knew English by the first grade. It doesn’t take long at all when you’re little. My little boy, I told his mom he’s going to learn to speak Spanish first, and so the first four years of his life it was all Spanish. Then after he turned four and he was going to go to—because he didn’t go to preschool—he’s going to go to kindergarten, I told him now he’s going to learn English. He learned it right away. Okay, so when he went in to kindergarten, he translated for the children who didn’t speak English, so the teacher was very happy with him because he was a translator for the other kids.





ESPINO:

It’s really complicated because it doesn’t work that way for everybody, for some reason. They haven’t figured out how to make bilingual education work so that kids can come in with Spanish and transition over to English pretty quickly. Was your whole family transitioned that quickly? They learned English in one year?





BECERRA:

Yes, because, see, everybody’s not the same. Everybody’s not the same, and maybe speaking came easier to me than it does to somebody else or the translation comes easier to me than it does to somebody else. Maybe that’s something I picked up from my dad or my mom, not that they spoke English. I very seldom spoke English to my dad. I always spoke to him in Spanish out of respect, and my mom, it was always Spanish. But everybody’s different, so that’s why I’d feel funny in the arguments, because I can’t make a general rule. There’s just no way.





ESPINO:

Yeah, because your case exemplifies that immersion can work and it can be fast, whereas in other cases what they’re arguing for is bilingual education the first three or four years when they establish their reading skills and then immersion or a transfer over to English.





BECERRA:

My ex-wife, the one I’m divorcing now, when the kids came over, one was nine years old and one was eleven.





ESPINO:

Her kids from her previous—





BECERRA:

Her kids, uh-huh. So the first year of school, they hung out with all the other kids who spoke only Spanish. So I told them, "I’ve got no problem with that because you’re in a new country and everything." The second year, I told them, "Okay, this year you’re going to drop those friends just like that. You just drop them." I tell them, "As mean as it sounds, it sounds mean, but now you have to learn English. You’re not a stranger here. You know where the stores are. You’re familiar with everything here. Now you learn English. Make new friends who speak English, okay, and that’s just the way it is. And those other kids, they’d better do the same thing, just drop it," and that’s what they did. The one that came over at eleven, she speaks good English. You can still see a little bit of an accent, but you have to look for it. The boy, who is not as bright as she is, who came in at nine years old, jeez, he speaks English better than if he had was born here. He is so good at speaking English, and he had learning disabilities, serious learning disabilities, right, but as far as his ability to speak and communicate, oh, it’s great, really, really good.





ESPINO:

Where did they move to?





BECERRA:

Montebello.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

Yeah, Montebello.





ESPINO:

And they didn’t have a bilingual program?





BECERRA:

They did have a bilingual program, but that’s not what helped them. What helped them was hanging out with the other kids who speak English. That’s going to have more of an influence, your peers, than the programs themselves. If your peers are speaking English, you’re going to make sure you learn English.





ESPINO:

What about the skills, like math and science? Were they able to keep up for their age level?





BECERRA:

Oh, yes. The one that did not have learning disabilities, yeah, she should have been put in college and stuff. But, yeah, she was really, really good. She was really good.





ESPINO:

Well, that’s a whole other question, because that was part of the Chicano Movement, advocacy for bilingual education.



1:18:57

BECERRA:

Yes. I still advocate for that, but I can’t get into the argument and argue one side or the other. The reason I did was because I believed in language equality more than anything else and I want to see Spanish taught to everybody in the schools, which I think it should be, and I don’t mean that just for political reasons.

When I was in high school and I took Spanish, okay, the first year, no big deal. Second year is when you learn conjugation, and when I learned conjugation, it blew me away, because then in the tenth grade, learning to conjugate verbs in Spanish was when I finally learned English grammar, studying Spanish. I said, "Oh!" Then the light bulb goes off, you know. But it wasn’t till the tenth grade that I learned what English grammar was all about because I was studying it in Spanish. [laughs]





ESPINO:

A lot of people say that, yeah, that it makes more sense when you learn the grammar focusing on the Spanish versus English. So were your teachers in elementary school, were they primarily Anglo?





BECERRA:

Yes. In elementary school, yes. I think I may have had one that wasn’t, but I can’t remember. All I remember is all the white ones.





ESPINO:

And how was that treatment? How was the treatment of those kinds of teachers with the Mexican students?





BECERRA:

You know, I really don’t remember. Because in every class there’s going to be a teacher’s pet, okay? [laughs] There’s going to be one kid who’s really bright or whatever, right, excels at something, right, and there would be teacher’s pets, but I don’t start seeing anything like what you’re talking about, how we were treated until the fifth grade. In the fifth grade I had a white friend whose name was Raymond, and we were always competing with each other and in geography especially. The teacher that teaches geography, she would give us what were called map drills and she had this world map on the wall. She pulled down the thing and she’d get us to go up there, and then it was a contest to see who can find—it’s funny because it’s a totally different map today, but at that time there was French Equatorial Africa or Dutch New Guinea or Portuguese, this part of Africa, right? [laughter]





ESPINO:

That’s funny.





BECERRA:

So where’s French Indochina, right? [laughter] But you had to know where all these countries were and you had to be the fastest one, so she’d give us contests to see—and the person who always won was either me or Raymond. So we knew geography, where all these countries were, which is—I can’t imagine today when they say in this poll shows that most Americans don’t even know where Iraq is. What? [laughs] In the fifth grade we knew where every country was because we had those drills, right? But that’s when I started noticing that, maybe because I was doing good. But, no, I never experienced, like, really, like, discrimination against me for being Mexican. No, uh-uh.





ESPINO:

You don’t remember being punished for speaking Spanish or having rules of how you should behave regarding your language and your culture? People talk about the low expectations that were placed on the Mexican students by the white teachers. They talk about being separated, as far as the high groups would be the white kids and the low groups would be the Spanish-speaking kids. You didn’t have any of that kind of experience, or your brothers or your sister?





BECERRA:

The white kids, it’s true that there were higher expectations of the white kids in grammar school. What’s funny is how—look, it was there, but it wasn’t, like, something we cared about, you know, because we cared about recess, okay? And really, the thing that struck you more than that was the racism, okay? And it was from day one, when you don’t even know you’re a Mexican in the sense of being in this country until you’re confronted with that racism, then you start realizing, "Wait a minute." [laughs] That was certainly a strong part of growing up. I mean, that would put a toll, like, a pretty heavy toll on you. Not the teachers, but the way that you were treated or looked at by the students, the white students. And it wasn’t that they hated you. That wasn’t it. It was just their attitude towards Mexicans and letting you know that you were a Mexican. So that’s why they had an attitude.





ESPINO:

Like stereotypes or assumptions? How would it manifest itself? They would make comments?



1:25:431:27:381:29:031:30:33

BECERRA:

Okay, let me go chronologically. You’re little, okay, and you’re watching TV. And when I was little—this is in the 1950s TV, black and white TVs, and there’s that program, The Cisco Kid, right, and the Cisco Kid and Pancho. And to me, I always cracked up because here are these two Mexicans, you know. One was a charro, the other one was a fat pendejo. But that was it. It was funny. He was a clown, right, and that was it. Didn’t think about anything else until this white boy tells me, "Yeah, but you understand the Cisco Kid, he’s Spanish, Mexican, and Pancho’s a Mexican."

And I looked at him. I looked at [unclear]. Fuck. [laughs] I’m sure that was what they were trying to relate in that serial, right, but I never paid attention to him because I’d see white Mexicans, I’d see brown Mexicans, and now all of a sudden I’m seeing the distinction being made. All of a sudden, why is this guy worried about it? But then that’s the first time that it hits you. Then you start getting older, right, and that’s when Walt Disney makes that movie Davy Crockett, and so everybody wants to have coonskin caps, and on your bicycle you want those raccoon tails and you want a Davy Crockett lunchbox, and everybody’s like that, you know. [unclear]. Yeah, but it tells you about how the Mexicans killed Davy Crockett. [laughs]

What? I’m not a history buff. I’m nineteen years old. "No shit?" "Yeah." But then they start bragging about how Davy Crockett’s killing all these Mexicans because he’s up there trying to kill these Mexicans with Old Betsy, his rifle. Now I get pissed off, right? Now somebody starts telling me that he’s proud because somebody’s killing Mexicans. That changes everything, right? So I go and I talk to my dad and my tía, my [unclear] is there, my cousin. My cousin had just come back from the army, and we started talking, and the family gets all pissed off. And so my tía tells, "You know what? You tell them that we were here before these assholes were here. You tell them you’re [unclear]. You tell them that your ancestors didn’t come over here on the Mayflower, that they met the Mayflower."

Will Rogers used to say, he said—yeah, and then my cousin got pissed off. He said, "You know what? Just tell them to answer this question. Who got the best of Davy Crockett?" I said, "Okay, okay." [laughs] So I’d have to go back to them and fight, because, you know, even though you weren’t asking for it, it was being thrown in your face. So that kid, he was so proud of Davy Crockett. My dad had a toolshed in the back that he had built himself, you know, wood, good-sized, maybe eight feet by eight feet, kind of tall. And there’s no lighting in there because it’s just a toolshed where [unclear] and where he put his tools for stuff, and there was always spiders and stuff in there.

So one day this kid that was always bragging about Davy Crockett, we got him in the backyard, right, because we played in the backyard. And me and my brother got him in the toolshed and then we were right outside and we shut the door on him, right? And he tried to get out. He [unclear]. [unclear] said, "No." [unclear] told him, "No!" And he says, "Why not?" "Because now you’re Davy Crockett, motherfucker. Get out of the Alamo," and we wouldn’t let him out. [laughs] He says, "No. Americans never give up. Americans never give up," and kept pounding on the door trying to get out.

So my brother, "This shit’s getting old. This guy’s not going to give up." So we told him, "Hey, you step on anything squishy, it’s one of the rats that’s running around in there." [laughs] He yelled, "Okay, I give up! I give up!" I said, "Okay." [unclear] So he goes, "Okay." "Who got the best of Davy Crockett?" "The Mexicans, the Mexicans!" We said, "Okay, now we let him out." So that’s the way that it was here. And I’m sitting in the class in the fifth grade, and Mrs. Taylor had gone to Mexico on vacation with some other teachers, right, and this is when we first start to learn about classism. They went to meet with some Mexican teachers and they stayed there and they would have dinners and teas with these teachers.

They were, like, professionals meeting professionals, right? This was way before teachers had unions, so they would have unions ten years later. So they said, "So we’re leaving. We want to tip the help." They said, "Don’t give them any tips. Don’t tip them. You’ll spoil them." They were used to the American, you know. Classicism is not like it is over there, right? So they said, "We couldn’t believe it. We wanted to give the help tips, and they said, ‘No, you’re going to spoil them.’"

So she told us her experience was like that, you know, in front of the kids, and one girl said, "Yeah, I was talking to my uncle, and he went down there, you know, and he says, ‘You know, whenever you park your car, you’d better have somebody watch it because, you know, them people down there, you know, they’ll steal anything in your car, your stereo.’" And the teacher got all embarrassed, you know, so she tried to change the subject real fast, but I caught it, you know, what she was saying. The little white girl was being taught that by the adults, right, and not just the adults, you know. Walt Disney did his part you know, Cisco Kid did his part, everybody did their part. And it would not stop.

It would not stop. All the time, it was like a constant thing, and even though you turned your back on it, tried to ignore it, you know, it’s something that’s always there and it doesn’t stop. The hillbillies move in next door to us, right? They were going to rent this house, and we used to really—Appalachian whites that used to move into our neighborhood, man, I’ll tell you why—this guy, he looks at us and he thinks he’s better than us because we’re "ferners." So I don’t know what the hell a ferner is, so I have to go ask my dad, "Dad, what’s a ferner?"





ESPINO:

He tells you you’re a ferner?





BECERRA:

Yeah, he told me I was a ferner, you know, and so I didn’t know what a ferner was, so I had to go ask my dad, "What’s a ferner, Dad?" Oh, my daddy got pissed off. More lectures on who are the real foreigners, right? And so right from the beginning, you know, my dad starts teaching me that, no, we’re not the foreigners; they’re the foreigners. I mean, we used to walk to school, to the bus stop, and we’re little and we’d walk past this one corner house where these other white people lived, and they had a pigeon cage, a big pigeon cage, but there’s no pigeons in it.

And so there was a bunch of possums inside hanging by their tails sleeping all the time. Every time we’d come by, the possums would be there just hanging, not doing anything, not playing, just hanging by their tails, sleeping. So we’d go by and it stunk. Boy, did it smell, because every time they pooped or anything, it would go right into the ground, and after a while, you know, the ground is saturated with urine and feces, so it smells. And I don’t know why [unclear] pets.

They don’t play. They don’t do nothing but hang by their tails. And I never had any idea, you know, until I was in high school and I saw The Beverly Hillbillies, right, and Grandma always made possum stew, right? [laughs] These assholes! These are the assholes. These fucking hillbillies thought they were better than Mexicans, these low-life motherfuckers. I was, "Jesus Christ, eating garbage like that," you know, ugh. Eating rodents. And it wasn’t because there wasn’t anything else to eat. Jesus Christ. And these were the people who called us ferners, right? I thought, yuck.





ESPINO:

You developed a lot of anger towards white folks growing up because they were so racist towards you.





BECERRA:

No, it wasn’t—I didn’t—





ESPINO:

I mean if they would have been kind and nice, you would have had a different viewpoint.





BECERRA:

Yeah, it was—yeah, you know, I can’t even—my best friend was white, okay, but he had problems with his family and then he moved. He was only my best friend for like about a year. Then they moved out because they were from Tennessee, also from the mountains, and so they never stayed in one place. They always moved around. All the people from Appalachia were always migrants. They would never stay in one place very long. But I’m trying to think who I had a good relationship with that was white. The only one was this Jewish kid, right, that lived across the street, but then his father made good money being a cabinetmaker in his garage and so they moved to Downey.

He was a good kid, really nice kid, was a good kid, a little bit nervous, a little hyper because his mom was always on his ass, you know, always yelling at him. I couldn’t believe it. I would think, "My god, I’m glad my mom ain’t like that," you know, always yelling and really bossy. But his mom, she tolerated us, you know. She wasn’t, like, mean to us. In fact, I would very much say she was cordial, and of all the white people who lived there, she was the only mom who ever had us over, who ever fed us lunch, who ever gave us, like, preserves, because she had peach trees in the back because she canned them. She was the only mom of the white moms who ever treated us nice, that Jewish lady, yeah.





ESPINO:

But were the rest, were they indifferent or were they mean?



1:38:111:39:441:41:471:43:18

BECERRA:

They would be indifferent because we never saw them. We never saw them. We always saw the kids. I don’t remember any of them except for the mean guy who called us a ferner, right? Him, I remember, but the rest, no. But, you know, the anger, when I was a kid, really it wasn’t anger. It was resentment and, like, how do you teach these people that we’re not what they think we are, and you resent that, you really, really resent that. And that stays with you your whole life, but especially at that time because that was just the way it was and it was relentless, all the time. But as bad as that was, shit, what the black kids would tell me was worse. Because the black kids I went to school with, they were just my schoolmates, playmates when we were young, schoolmates, friends, you know, and stuff. But at school, in high school, they started telling me stories about—you know, they were living in Compton, but Grandma and Grandpa were still in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana.

So at Christmastime or Thanksgiving, the family would get together for Thanksgiving or Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa, right, and so they would come back with stories, damn, about lynchings, telling me about the kid who whistled at a white woman was lynched for it. Damn. But to me they were gross, it was mean, what they were doing, but it was far away. And I would see the demonstrations and Martin Luther King and stuff, but it was still happening somewhere else. And even though I thought it was mean, it was like—I mean, all I knew was Tijuana and L.A., right, and not even all of L.A. It was Compton. I didn’t know East L.A., just in Compton. So everything else was another world, and I thought, "Man, that’s mean."

And then by the time I was in high school, by senior year I just wanted to quit school, I was so frustrated. I don’t know why, but I was just really, really frustrated and I was happy that I was going to go into the navy. I just wanted to get away. So when I go on active duty, I first go to electrician school, electrician’s mate school in December. By then I’m eighteen and I start school in December of ’63. And when you’re in the navy and you meet guys from all over the country, everybody is eager to tell you what it’s like back home because they miss home. Wherever home is, they miss it, and now they’re in California and California is like a foreign country to them.

They don’t know anybody, don’t know anything, and California, of all places, is weird. They’ll tell you all kinds of stuff, but the land of fruits and nuts, you know, between weirdos and queers is what they’re talking about, right? And at that time that’s the way you talk. And then some people say, "Yeah, well, California’s full of queers and steers," or, "Texas is full of queers and steers." That’s [unclear]. Queers and steers is Texas, right? And they hated California because everything that was California was weird, which it was. If you come from a conservative area, California is going to be very strange to you, right?

So the first day I meet these guys, they’re in my class. Our class for electrician’s mate school in San Diego, it was the U.S. Naval Training Center in San Diego. That’s where I went for electrician’s mate training. There was forty guys in our class. Out of the forty guys, there was one black, three Mexicans, and thirty-six whites, so for my first time in my life I was going to a white school, in the navy. And I realized that because, goddamn, you know, it was different from high school. There was no whites at all in my high school. So they divided us into twenty and twenty, twenty in one class, twenty in another room. So I’m in line to go and eat lunch at the mess hall. We’re going to mess the mess hall. So this boy, a good ol’ boy from Mississippi, he wants to tell me how much fun it is growing up in Mississippi, how much fun it is. So I’m looking at him. He [unclear]. I don’t know.

He just looks like a normal, regular guy who’s got, like, horn-rimmed glasses like Buddy Holly used to have, right, but I have horn-rimmed glasses too. And big white boy says, "Yeah, it’s so much fun, man, you know, Friday nights." Jesus Christ. "Friday nights after the football game, we’re all getting drunk. We’re drinking beer and we get in the back of the pickup truck and pull the shotguns out, you know, and then we go through Coon Town. Oh, goddamn." He starts laughing. He says, "We’d go through Coon Town and we’d shoot out all the windows, bam, bam, bam, of all the people. You oughta seen them niggers running out there, out into the woods. It was so funny. It was so much fun." He was laughing so hard, he was going like this, you know, laughing. And he doesn’t know who the fuck he’s talking to, you know. All of a sudden, all them fuckin’ stories that had been told, I mean this is the fuckin' monster who did it.

They’re getting down on Castro right now in Cleveland. You know, that’s nothing. You know, sure, he had those people to harass for ten years. These assholes had these people terrorized their whole lives, terrorized, and those people, nothing they could do about it. The people were running back. They had to clean up their houses, the glass, all that, and always be scared. They’d never know when these crazy white people were going to come by in those trucks. And this son of a bitch, I mean, you talk about dehumanizing, fuck. You know, as I’m looking at him, I remember my jaw, my jaw just dropped, you know. Fuck. I’m looking at him and he’s looking at me like what’s wrong with me, right? And I can’t eat. I’m going to go in. I can’t eat. My stomach’s all in a knot because I just met a fucking monster, a fucking crazy motherfucker. What’s wrong with him, you know? And I couldn’t eat, you know. I thought, fuck.

And so then I’m back sitting in class, like a week later. These two boys are in there. They’re from Louisiana, they say from Baton Rouge, but nobody wants to claim they’re, like, from three swamps down from Baton Rouge, you know, so they’re going to claim Baton Rouge. And they got into the navy on the Buddy Program. You enlist together, you go to school together, so you’re on the same ship together, right? So one of them says, "You ain’t gonna believe what happened." I said, "What happened?"

He says, "Me and Billy Joe," and that was his real name, was Billy Joe. "Me and Billy Joe, we went to the zoo," because we were in San Diego, so they go to the San Diego Zoo. "You won’t believe what we saw." I said, "What?" "We saw a nigga with a white girl." Said, "Yeah?" "Yeah, right there in front of everybody, holding hands, kissing in front of everybody. I told Billy Joe, ‘Billy Joe, look at that, Billy Joe. Billy Joe, look at that.’ We couldn’t believe it. You know, back home we’d have got a shotgun and we’d have shot him. We would have killed him." I thought, "Jesus Christ. Fuck, you know, I’m just, what, two weeks into school and now I’m with these assholes." And it wasn’t going to stop. All the time you’re in the navy, you’re going to see that shit, you know? In the sixties.





ESPINO:

What’d you do? What’d you say? Did you just have to eat it?



1:44:28

BECERRA:

Yeah, yeah. You know, there was one black and one Mexican in there, and what am I going to tell these guys? I mean, we’re talking about their religion. You’re not going to convert them to another religion.

This is the way they’ve grown up thinking. To them, this is what is right. Even when the governor of the state blocks the entrance of black people to a university, when they’ve rioted because they don’t want integration, their history of lynching people, and I’m going to change them? Tell me now, what’s there to argue? There’s nothing to argue. No. [laughs] No, I made up my mind while I was in the [unclear], I thought, "For the next few years I’m going to be living with these people, so what I’m going to do—." [interruption]





ESPINO:

Okay. So we’ll leave it right here and we’ll get back to this period next time.





BECERRA:

Okay.

Session Two (May 13, 2013)





ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino. Today is May 13th. I’m interviewing Cruz Becerra, previously known as Cruz Olmeda, at his home in Commerce, California. I want to start with last time you talked about how your parents were living here without documents, but they did have documents; they were just fake. So even with their fake documents, they were afraid of being deported?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

How did they think they could get caught?





BECERRA:

Well, my mom’s in-laws on my father’s side, one of them was really vicious and she would threaten to call Immigration on my folks, and so that was the main reason. Nobody else gave us any problems, just the one crazy aunt that we had. She was the only one. So that was one reason and the main reason.





ESPINO:

She was your mom’s sister or your dad’s?





BECERRA:

My father’s sister. My father’s sister, and she was vicious and she was nuts too. On top of everything else, she was nuts. So we thought, well, if she could do it, somebody else could do it, too, you know, so that’s why it was an issue all the time until my dad fixed his papers.





ESPINO:

Did they ask you to keep it secret and not tell anyone, or were you able to tell your friends?





BECERRA:

No, I didn’t tell any of my friends. [laughs] No way. I don’t know how we knew, but we knew that we weren’t going to talk about that. Some people don’t know until they’re older, right? But, no, we knew right away when we were younger, when we were kids. Yeah, we knew right away.





ESPINO:

And you mentioned that there were many immigration raids in the fifties, around that time. In your neighborhood where you lived?





BECERRA:

No, they were in the factories. Where we lived, there were no factories. It was country. But my dad would comment and other relatives would call us and let us know they raided this factory or they raided that factory, because that’s all they were doing. They were not going to people’s homes or bus stops, necessarily, although I’m sure they did that, too, but mostly it was in the factories. There were factory raid after factory raid, and that’s why we knew it was taking place, because we didn’t live in the city. We were across the street from the city limit of L.A., but it was still very much country where we were.





ESPINO:

What about your church? Did they deal with the immigration issue? Was that part of the culture of the church, the sermon, maybe some of the social service aspect of what the church did?



00:03:13

BECERRA:

No, the church—the minister that we had—first, the doctrine itself is very, very sectarian. Everybody else is a sinner. All the other religions are wrong. They’re all going to hell. So the only focus of the doctrine was to save souls, right, and that was it. There was no outreach.

The outreach that did take place would be by individual members of the church, like my mother or, say, a minister who saw his ministry as being with orphans or going to Mexico to work with the campesinos, which one of the—when I came back from the navy, one of the students at the Latin American Bible Institute, he was a progressive guy and he went to Mexico, I forget which state, but he ended up as a minister to start a mission there. And he saw the poverty there and he wrote letters back talking about how poor people were and also the struggle of the campesinos.

They ended up converting him instead of him converting them, or maybe it worked both ways, but he was very strongly in support of the struggle for land and agrarian reform and for the rights of those campesinos who were really being oppressed by the ricos over there. But that was the ministers who was very few, very few who would see their ministry as ministering to the poor. Other ones, the majority were just trying to save souls and that was it. They didn’t go beyond that.





ESPINO:

Like food drives and—





BECERRA:

Nothing, nothing.





ESPINO:

—like shelter?





BECERRA:

My sister, I told her that some people were running for mayor in the city of Maywood. The church eventually ended up in Maywood and they ended up with a Head Start program there, and I told my sister, I said, "I couldn’t believe it. I went to this meeting to unclear] for some of the candidates there, and the representative was—." It’s called Iglesia de [unclear]. I said, "I couldn’t believe it, that they were there." The church had never done anything like this before, but they were there to support one of the candidates, the Head Start people were. So I was really surprised that the church [unclear], but it took them, like, almost sixty years or more, more than sixty years to get to that stage.





ESPINO:

Because I imagine at that time the poverty was probably pretty severe for Mexican Americans.





BECERRA:

Yeah, it was, but, you know, you were, like, on your own. If everybody was poor, everybody was poor. That was it. In fact, I talked to the minister’s son today and said, yeah, we were really poor, but we didn’t know it. We didn’t realize it. This was the world that we knew. So we didn’t realize it, how poor, except later on you would turn on TV and you would see Leave it to Beaver and you’d figure, "What planet do they live on? Because it’s totally different from our world." But, no, everybody was poor and that’s just the way it was. That was before Lyndon Johnson came into office and decided to start the Great Society programs. Lyndon Johnson was the best. He was the best president. He was like a victim of his own ideology as well with the war in Vietnam, but he was a southerner and he still had the World War II, Korean War mentality, and that was his downfall. I feel bad about that, both for him and for the Vietnamese and for everybody, but domestically, you couldn’t beat him. He was the best since Roosevelt, maybe even in some ways better, but certainly the best since Roosevelt.





ESPINO:

Yeah, from my interviews, you could see how his policies had a huge impact on the Mexican American community and especially in East Los Angeles. You mentioned a couple of things. One is that when you came back from the service—so when you left for the service, did you have an idea that you were going to keep practicing your religion or did you keep practicing while you were in San Diego?





BECERRA:

No, because [unclear]. Yeah, I would come home on the weekends.





ESPINO:

Every weekend?





BECERRA:

Yeah. What happened was that—this is funny. We’d go in class and the top three people would have their scores every week posted. You could score up to 100. You had a daily test, a quiz, right, that was worth ten points, and then 90 percent of your score was the weekly test. So the very first week, the three people that scored the highest were posted, and I was one of the three. Two gabachos had beat me; one had a 99.6, a 99.4, and I was 99.0. So all the Chicanos were so happy, "Orale Cruz! You’re carrying the flag for la Raza! I said, "All right." So they were all happy. But when you scored that high, you were given the option of being what was called a night-school teacher, to be a tutor for the other sailors who were not scoring as good in school, who were not doing [unclear] problems. It’s called the night-school instructor. So once you became a night-school instructor, you had the weekends off, every weekend off from Friday to Monday.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

So, yeah, I became a night-school instructor and I had a girlfriend in Compton, so I’d come to see her all the time. So every weekend I would come. So then on Sundays, of course, we would go to church. When I went in the navy, yeah, I would go to church for the Protestant services, but then I stopped. I stopped because I went to one service and I remember at the end of the service the minister gave a prayer, you know, [unclear]. It was either the beginning or the end, and he killed it for me. He prayed for us, for our families, you know, because they were sad because we were gone and we were away from them, prayed for the officers and prayed for the president and for wisdom and leadership and all kinds of crap.

And when he finished, I thought, "Wait a minute. He forgot somebody. How about the Vietnamese?" He wasn’t praying for the Vietnamese. What happened was that when we were little, my mom would sit down with us and pray, and we always prayed for the Russians and the Chinese. She taught us. She prayed. She said, "We always pray for our enemies." And these were the enemies of this country. You’ve got to pray for them too. So when he finished that prayer, I thought, "Goddamn, we’re blowing these people up, killing them, and he’s not got a goddamn thing to say about it." So I was pissed, so I never went back to church. That’s when I stopped. I said, "This is bullshit."





ESPINO:

Was that just that one moment of, like, an epiphany or was it something that was building over time, your critique?



00:11:57

BECERRA:

No, at that point, that had been building over time. At that point I decided, "This is bullshit. This is just bullshit. You don’t do this. This is not what my mom taught me. This isn’t Christianity. This is it." Bam. I stopped going. Then when I came back, I went back to church. I went back to live with my folks and went to church, and my folks saw that I was really pissed all the time, you know. The minister came over, a different minister that they had, and I asked him about things outside of the church, how he felt about the Civil Rights Movement and stuff. And he said, "Well, you know, I support Martin Luther King. I support him, but, you know, now the black people are getting out of hand. They’re getting violent." He was talking about, like, the Black Panthers and stuff like that.

"They’re getting violent and stuff like that." I said, "Oh. Well, what about the war in Vietnam?" He goes, "Well, I don’t meddle in politics." Well, you just did, but now he says now he doesn’t meddle into politics, right? So I said, "That’s it. That’s it. No more." So they said, "No, no, we’ve got somebody else for you to meet, this young man," the one that I told you went to Mexico as a young minister. Oh, he was really a good guy, but that wasn’t enough to convince me to go back. That was it. I was not an atheist at that point, but I knew I wasn’t going to be that kind of a Christian. I wasn’t going to go to church. That was it. I was through with the church.

Later on I would start thinking more and more about it as I became a Communist and I read about Marx, his writings and other writings on the church and then the history of the church in Mexico, and then I’d see these right-wing preachers always preaching for the war, and I thought, goddamn, they’re just an extension of the state, preaching. This isn’t an accident. This is not an accident. There’s a reason why they all fall in line. So I stopped, I stopped going to church.





ESPINO:

So your mom was aware of the Cold War?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And that’s why she would ask you pray for the Russians?



00:13:18

BECERRA:

My mom, she knew that—there was a draft at the time. We were all going to be drafted. If you did not enlist in one of the services, the army would draft you, and she didn’t want that to happen, so she always told me that she wanted me to go in the navy. And what happened is that she’d always say, "Tienes que cumplir con tu obligación con el gobierno." Always, "Tienes que cumplir con tu obligación con el gobierno." And that’s how I was raised. So when it came time to go and when they knocked on the door when I was seventeen, right around my birthday, I was ready, and especially since it was a navy recruiter, which is what my mom wanted. Yeah, I was ready to go.

Yeah, she was aware of the Cold War. Kennedy had not been assassinated yet. Kennedy would not be assassinated till after I graduated from high school. I graduated in June, and he was killed in November, like four, five months later. And then the church was sad, and one of the people said—because he was—Mexicans had a different attitude towards Kennedy than white people did, you know?





ESPINO:

Even though your family was not Catholic, they weren’t opposed to him being Catholic?





BECERRA:

Some of my family was. My dad never spoke about that, but my aunt did. She was like a fanatic. She was the one that I told you was a nut. She said, "Oh, you haven’t lived under the rule of Catholics like we did in Mexico. You don’t understand what it is to be under that kind of rule." I understood, because there was the Mexican Revolution because of that rule, and she felt that with a Catholic president coming in, that we would revert back to that kind of rule in this country. It wasn’t going to happen, not like that, you know. And so they tried to influence my parents. But my father still voted for Kennedy. He might have been a Pentecostal, but he was a Democrat.





ESPINO:

So your father was in the military during World War II?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Many scholars look at that war as a hugely important war for Mexican Americans because when they came back, they had these new ideas about democracy.





BECERRA:

Yes, very much.





ESPINO:

Did your dad have those ideas? Because you said he had a critique of Mexico, but a loyalty at the same time to the Mexican Revolution.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Did he instill in you any kind of patriotism towards the United States? Like your mother said that you need to complete your obligation to the government by—





BECERRA:

Neither of them did. Neither of them did. That really came from school, and I was always in conflict with what I was taught in school because of the way my father had raised me, the stories he had told me of Mexico, the history of Mexico. So, no, the patriotism came from two sources. One was school, even though I had a conflict there, and the other one was that I read a lot, and the paper that I read a lot was the Herald Examiner, which was a right-wing newspaper, and I’d read Walter Winchell, and he was very right-wing. He was against Martin Luther King, said the NAACP had been infiltrated by Communists and stuff like that. So those are the views that I had when I went in the navy. They were not progressive views with regard to this country. It wasn’t till I was in the navy that I changed my mind and my views became totally different, radicalized, and that was because I was participating in a war and it was wrong. You know, I came to realize it was wrong, not at the beginning. At the beginning I thought, "Yeah, we’re going to go stop the Communists. We’re going to kill the Communists and all that." But then, you know, "What the fuck? Something’s wrong here."





ESPINO:

So you did have an anti-Communist perspective in the fifties.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And then going into the sixties.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Did you have—well, how would you define it? I mean, how extreme or not extreme would you explain your anti-Communist views?





BECERRA:

No, they were just normal anti-Communist views, you know.





ESPINO:

But I mean, did you think they all should be incarcerated for life? Did you think that they should be hunted down? Did you agree with the McCarthy—that kind of thing?



00:18:35

BECERRA:

No. In fact, on the contrary. If I’d had any ideas like that, my father would have stopped it, because my father remembered the Smith Act and he was very conscious of that and he knew they were going after immigrants behind the Smith Act. And so, no, my dad would have stopped it right there if I ever went that far. He would have stopped it right there. No, I was not for incarcerating Communists. In fact, when in 1959, 1960, Fidel comes into power in Cuba, my dad was very supportive of Fidel. I remember at that time they did not have, like, delayed broadcasts, and we’re watching TV, you know, black and white, and they were interviewing Fidel. I forget what it was that Fidel said. Oh, they said at the end of the interview, they said, "What do you think about the U.S. relationship to the revolution, to Batista?"

And Fidel starts laughing and he says, "You want for I tell you the truth?" They said, "Well, yeah, that’s what we want." "Okay, I’ll tell you. Batista could always tell his troops, ‘No matter what happens, Uncle Sam will be here to back you up.’ We could never say that." He says, "We could never count on the American forces to back us up. We had to go against them knowing that maybe they would come against us." And then on another occasion we saw a speech. I think that Fidel—maybe he addressed the United Nations and we saw that. Fidel was speaking in Spanish, and between the interpreters we could hear what he was saying. He was addressing the issue of the executions, which happened either after the revolutions or during the revolutions, and he’s telling people, "Yeah, they’re criticizing us for these executions, pero donde estaban cuando nuestro juventud amanecia muerta, asesinados por ese gobeirno del Batista en los callejones de Habana. Y donde estaban esas voces?" He was pissed. And my dad would say, "That’s right. I agree with it."





ESPINO:

Are you talking about the executions of his own men or the executions of the enemy?



00:20:36

BECERRA:

After the revolution, they rounded up the Batistianos, okay, and they executed them. There were public trials that were like people’s courts, because people would be accused of something, "Okay, what have you got to say for yourself?" blah, blah, blah. "Okay, paradón." [snaps fingers] They’d execute them. There were no trials. I mean, that was the trial. You’d be accused of something and like in any situation like that, they’re going to have both the guilty and the innocent executed, you know, and that’s just the way it is.

One time I was at work and this Cuban brother was there, and he and I would get into arguments over the question of Fidel because he would always be criticizing Fidel. He hated Fidel. We didn’t argue too much, but he knew my views. One time we were alone and he says, "Let’s talk about it. So it’s just between you and me. Nobody else is around, just me and you are going to talk about this." He says, "Look," he says, "you know how I feel about Fidel and the revolution. [unclear] to support it." I said, "That’s asesino. Why do you support him? When it comes to being an assassin for killing people, innocent people, put them up against the wall, shooting them, neither Fidel nor Che can come even close to Zapata [unclear]. They are Sunday School teachers compared to these guys. After a battle, they didn’t take prisoners of war. They had no jails to put them in. The enemy was put up against the wall and shot. These are other Mexicans. They just happened to be soldiers on the government side, indios. They probably couldn’t even read or write, probably drafted by force to fight. They were executed by the thousands."

Remember, 5 percent of the Mexican population would die during the Mexican Revolution. It was bloody. "Zapata did the same thing," I said, "and that’s the way revolutions are. You support the Mexican Revolution. You say, ‘I support this, I support that.’ No, no, you support the revolution, period. And you can say, ‘Yeah, I don’t like that.’ Personally, I could not have fought in the Mexican Revolution because I don’t like the idea of picking up a rifle and killing somebody else like that, my own people. Can’t do it, just can’t do it. But things had to be really bad, really bad for people to do that, to have to fight like that and kill each other to stop the oppression and the lives they were living, the the starvation they were going through. It had to be really bad." I said, "But Fidel and Che don’t compare. Look. [unclear] and Zapata are heroes to us in spite of that. The government did the same thing. The government was doing the same thing." [unclear] to a brother from Mexico who was in my union and he’s—I won’t say too much about him, but I told him, I says, "El gobierno hacía la misma cosa!" That’s the way a revolution is." And so I told him that, I said, "So no matter what you say about Fidel, [unclear], and Che, they don’t come close, not even by 1 percent, compared to what our heroes did."





ESPINO:

When you compare that experience with the propaganda in the classroom, how did you reconcile those two different perspectives?





BECERRA:

How’s that?





ESPINO:

Well, what I imagine you would be learning about Cuba and the Cuban Missile Crisis and that kind of thing in school would be very different from what you were learning at home by watching this [unclear].





BECERRA:

No, it was too new. It was really too new, because this was 1960. I graduated in ’63, okay? In school it would be too early on in history. It would be too contemporary for us to study that in school.





ESPINO:

So, like as a contemporary issue, as a current event, your teachers weren’t talking about it?





BECERRA:

No, no. If they were talking about anything, they would be talking about the election of Kennedy, which they saw as very, very important. After years of Eisenhower, it was very important. And the civil rights struggle, those issues there they might raise. In fact, those are the only two issues, contemporary political issues that they would raise. They didn’t raise anything else.





ESPINO:

Did you have any teachers that you recall as teaching you the most or being the most inspirational from your junior high or from any of your school years?



00:25:45

BECERRA:

No. The best teacher I had, I think, was an eleventh-grade English teacher. The teachers had to be careful what they said. There was no unions at that time, and the teacher would talk to us and he’d tell us—these are the types of things he would tell us. First of all, for our vocabulary, he would bring a Playboy magazine to school and he would go through there and pick words out and put them on the chalkboard, up on the chalkboard, and said, "This is a word." And we learned a lot of words came from the articles in Playboy magazine. And he said, "You know, I can’t show the pictures, obviously, but the articles and vocabulary here, you should know it. This magazine is really for educated people. Look at this. And the vocabulary is what I’m going to teach you from here," and that’s what he did. He wasn’t afraid to bring it in, just couldn’t show us the pictures.

Then what else what he did, he would talk to us about some young teachers at our high school who were really into organizing the union for the teachers. He says, "You know, a lot of the teachers here are saying we’re professionals, unions are not for professionals and we should not be in unions. That’s for the working class, not for professional workers, but I don’t agree with them. I can say it because I’m old and I’m about to retire, but these youngsters, these younger teachers, they have a lot of guts by taking on these administrators, but they have a lot of courage because they’re at the forefront and they’re doing this." And so he told us [unclear] trade unionist. And then the other thing, this one Chicano stood up when he gave his book report, and it was on the book Exodus. They made a movie out of it, too, and there was a ship called Exodus. It was about—





ESPINO:

World War II?



00:27:30

BECERRA:

After World War II, close of World War II, the Jews are displaced persons, and they can’t figure out where to take them. Maybe they don’t have documentation. They say, "I’m from Poland, I’m from—," wherever. And the Zionists have this dream about Israel and get this boat and they call it the Exodus, named after the Bible, and they bring a lot of Jews on to that ship and they take it to Israel. The British are pissed because it was a British colony and they didn’t want [unclear], but they make sure they get there. Then they have to struggle against the Palestinians and against the Jordanians, etc., Syrians, Egyptians, to try and establish a state.

So this Chicano stands up and gives a book report on that, and when he finished it, the teacher stands up and goes, "You know, something I have to tell you, okay? You should not allow people to manipulate you. This book is—." I’m not sure if he used the word "Zionist," but he says, "This book is propaganda and it’s written in such a way as to manipulate your thinking and how you view things, how you analyze things. You should not allow yourself to be manipulated by these types of writings, because it’s propaganda." [laughs] He didn’t have to tell us it was Zionist propaganda, but you saw it. "Wow, why is he telling me that?" I couldn’t figure—I had never read the book, but I saw the movie, right, and the movie was very powerful. Paul Newman is in it, and it showed the Palestinians as ruthless cutthroats, really literally cutthroats, right?

And he was trying to warn us against that in the eleventh grade. Other teachers didn’t do that. I had a Spanish teacher, a Mexican American Spanish teacher. He was talking to us and the question of conquista came up, right, and he says, "Well, you know, people, they kind of talk about how bad it was, but, you know—." [laughs] I thought, "What the fuck?" My daddy had told me it was bad. It was bullshit. This guy tried to tell me, like, it wasn’t that big of a deal, right? I didn’t pick up on it right away. So, no, you would think that he would be the one [unclear]. No, he wasn’t no Sal Castro, obviously. [laughter] Other teachers would start to say things and then they would stop because they were, like, really scared. We were coming out of the McCarthy era, the Eisenhower period, and so there was only so much they were going to be able to say, and so they were very conscious of that. They would start to say stuff, but they wouldn’t.





ESPINO:

Well, that’s fascinating, because you don’t often hear about the teachers that might have had a political perspective, but just were nervous about expressing it. What I’m hearing in the interviews is more about the teachers who didn’t hold Mexican Americans in high regard and who pretty much ignored Mexicans in the room and focused their teaching on the white students and helping the white students get into college.





BECERRA:

Well, I didn’t see any white students at school, so—





ESPINO:

There were no white students in your—





BECERRA:

Not a single one.





ESPINO:

What happened to—okay, so I’m confused, because you said that in your neighborhood there were a lot of people from Appalachia and Tennessee.





BECERRA:

Yes, when I was four, five, six, seven, eight years old, nine years old. Okay, then what happens, by the time I’m ten, eleven, twelve, the first African Americans moved on to our block, and then when that happens, all the whites scattered. And every time a house was sold, an African American family would buy it or rent it, so they’re buying and renting in that neighborhood. But that was, like, by the time I was, like—they [unclear] me when I was eight—no, when I was, like, nine, ten, eleven years old, that’s when that change took place. When I was in elementary school, I could see the pictures, and it was integrated. Kids from the white part of Compton would come to MacKay Elementary School, and black students and some Japanese students and ourselves, the Latinos. But then towards the end of junior high school, I think there was only one white student at Enterprise Junior High School.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

And then high school, nothing.





ESPINO:

Wow. That changed fast.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

How did your parents feel about the African Americans moving into the neighborhood?





BECERRA:

It didn’t bother them at all because—





ESPINO:

There’s racism, too, in Mexican American families towards blacks and towards—



00:33:49

BECERRA:

Yeah, but with them it was no different. The families started moving in, right? The black families were moving in. And let me give you examples. One family, it was a white woman married to a black man and she was of Greek origin. She wasn’t Greek from Greece, but she was like Greek American and she spoke very good Spanish and she used to talk to my mom all the time. And my mom used to spend all kinds of time with her. Terry. To us, her husband was like a hero to us because you’re a little kid and this black man, the only job he could get was at the junkyard. So we’d get on our bicycles and we’d go [unclear]. The junkyards were kind of far down on Broadway, so we’d get on our bicycles and we’d go down to the junkyard to see Mr. Bibbs [phonetic].

He would save the ball bearings, had steel bearings like that, you know, and we’d use them for playing marbles. They were steelies, you know, and so he would save them for us. So it was a big adventure to go to the junkyard, see Mr. Bibbs. And so we’d come back and we’d play marbles. We’d have regular marbles, glass marbles and those, and then we’d see him. He was poor, so he would go out to the desert and shoot rabbits, jackrabbits, and bring them home, and he opened up the trunk of his car, and it’d be full of dead jackrabbits, right? So he’d take them in the backyard. He’d skin them, right, and then they’d put him in the freezer. That was their meat for quite a while. I mean, that’s pretty poor. Jesus Christ.

So my mom didn’t have a problem, and then what happened was she started working because she had never worked. She starts to work. My baby sister is babysat by one of the families there, Mrs. Ruth [phonetic], and I’ll tell some stories about that family. So then that’s what happens is that my little sister learns to speak English and not Spanish, so there’s a communication problem between my mom and her baby.





ESPINO:

Oh, because she was in childcare most of her—





BECERRA:

Well, not just that, but after she came out of childcare with the neighbor, she’d want to play outside with children and all the children were black children. Okay, so the English again, and, of course, it was African American English, right? I didn’t tell you about that?





ESPINO:

No.





BECERRA:

Oh, my god. Yeah, I came back from the navy, and my baby sister is three years old now, right, and my mom would call me, "Ven, van para aca Cruz! Que quiere? Dime que quiere!" My little sister had opened up the refrigerator and she couldn’t open the drawer in the bottom where the fruit was, and she was trying to tell my mom that she wanted an apple and she didn’t know how to say it in Spanish, didn’t even know how to say it, "Que quiere? Dime que quiere!" So I’d be laughing. I go, "What do you want, mija?" "Apple." I’d said, "Okay, okay, quiere una manzana." "Okay pues que me diga!" She did, but she doesn’t speak Spanish. So they couldn’t talk to each other, they couldn’t communicate, right?





ESPINO:

Oh, wow.





BECERRA:

And I thought it was funny, but then I go outside and she’d be playing with all the little black girls, you know, and they’d be playing patty-cake in a circle. They would all be standing in a circle, and she’s only three years old. At three years old, you don’t understand rules in a game, you know, and if somebody explains it to them, you’re not going to understand the rules. You’re only three years old. So she’d be playing patty-cake and all the girls, all the little black girls would all be dancing as they’re singing the song [unclear]. And so she’d be dancing, too, just like them, right? And then she was out. She was out, you know, and they tell her, "Okay, you’re out." And she’d get mad because she did not understand the rules. So she’d get mad and she’d get pissed and she got—and they’d be telling her, "You’re out." And she got mad, so she goes—I swear to God this is exactly what she did. She puts her hands on her hips just like this, "Huh. Nigger, you hush your mouth," just like that. And I heard her, right? So I come running and I said, "Mija, you can’t talk like that." And she looks at me like am I crazy, you know, because—





ESPINO:

They all talk like that.





BECERRA:

They all talk like that. She doesn’t understand she can’t speak that way. But that was her little world. That’s the world that she was growing up in, right? And forever she and my other sister always spoke with that kind of an accent, you know, a Compton accent, a black Compton accent, right? But, no, the neighborhood, we grew up around it and it grew up around us. The problem did not occur until after 1965, okay, and after the whole rebellion in Watts, a lot of the youngsters changed their attitude about their acceptance of the way things were and they began to have really rebellious attitudes. And then what happens, though, is that drugs come into play. There had been no drugs in the neighborhood. Now drugs come into play, and once that happens, you have crime. Once you had drugs, you had crime, and so then my parents decided they’re moving out. It wasn’t African Americans that moved them out; it was the crime that came along with the drugs years later. Originally, there wasn’t any drugs, no crime, nothing, but then things changed. You get drugs, you have crime, and they decided to move and they moved to [unclear].





ESPINO:

So your mom never learned English?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

And your sister never learned Spanish?





BECERRA:

Oh, yes. The thing is, she spoke it, but she was the baby, so she would speak it all broken and stuff, and they thought it was so cute for the baby to be speaking funny Spanish, so they would not correct her. But she speaks Spanish, not as well as her older sister and I did, but she spoke it and she understood it because she had to communicate with my mom as she was growing up, because my mom quit working and she was always at home with my mom. So, yes, she learned it later, but not when she was a baby. She spoke Compton English. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Wow. That’s fascinating. So it seems like it was a safe neighborhood, I mean if you’re letting your little three-year-old out, play by themselves out in the street.





BECERRA:

Sure. It was a very safe neighborhood. There wasn’t any problems at all, at all, and it wasn’t a middle-class black neighborhood. It was a working-class black neighborhood, and, yes, it was very safe. There was no problems at all. You know, things changed, but things change.





ESPINO:

What year did they move out?





BECERRA:

Probably 1970.





ESPINO:

Until 1970?





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

So you were coming back every weekend. Did you come back around the time of the Watts—





BECERRA:

No, because I was in school. In that school, I was in school in 1963 and ’64, from December of ’63 till April of 1964, and Watts didn’t happen until ’65, when I was overseas.





ESPINO:

You were overseas already in ’65. You were twenty years old. Okay. So we were talking about your—





BECERRA:

Oh, just one thing about Watts. The way that I found out about it, what’s happening in Watts, was I was in Tokyo and I was going on vacation. These girls were going to go to this island. It’s like a lovers’ island. It’s got a volcano, and the tradition had been when a Japanese boy and girl fall in love and their parents won’t let them get married, they would go to Oshima, this island, Oshima, and honeymoon, and they’d go up to the volcano, hold hands, and jump into the volcano.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

So now when we went there, they had a fence around it to stop suicides. It was lovers’ leap, is what I guess what you’d call it here. So we’re in Tokyo and we’re going to go get the ferry to go to the island, and I look up and there’s this marquee like in Times Square where the news is being flashed, and it says in Compton that there was rioting in Compton and that three people had been killed. And I look. I said, "What the fuck? I’m from Compton. What the hell’s going on?" But I couldn’t figure out why in Tokyo it was, like, headline news, right? So then we went to the island and we spent some time there, a few days there, and we come back. I go by the same marquee at Tokyo, and now all kinds of people have been killed and the rioting is still going on. I said, "Damn." That’s how I learned about it. Then later I would read in the newspapers overseas and the magazines what had occurred. But that’s how I found out about what was going on. It was headline news around the world.





ESPINO:

I bet.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Because they had all the images of the fires and the—





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Plus you had the images, I would imagine—I don’t know if you were watching news with your parents or on your own or if it was part of your experience when you were in San Diego of the civil rights struggles in the South, as far as the sit-ins and the repression and integration and all of that. Were you following those stories too?





BECERRA:

Yes, but I was following them and I thought they mattered, but they weren’t getting to me. They weren’t getting to me until I went in the navy and I met those southern good ol’ boys. Jesus Christ, that’s when it finally hit me hard. I thought, "These people are—." And they’re still crazy. The racism down there, you know, they say, well, there’s a new South. Bullshit. It’s still the same way. I mean, the guy that really hates this immigration reform is Senator Sessions from Alabama. So I’m watching Rachel Maddow, and she says, "Yes, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions." Jefferson Beauregard, oh, my god, the third, by the way, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. That means he comes from a long line of racist assholes, you know, and they’re not going to change. He’s not going to change, and probably his kids aren’t going to change. I said, "Well, maybe the next generation. Hmm. I don’t think so." He might have kids like Dick Cheney has, like Dick Cheney’s daughter, right? She’s just like her daddy, just like her daddy, except because she’s lesbian she supports gay marriage, but outside of that, no. So, no, I think Beauregard, Senator Sessions’ kids are probably going to be just like him.





ESPINO:

Well, those soldiers that you encountered—





BECERRA:

Sailors.





ESPINO:

Sailors. Sailors. How did they feel about Mexicans? Did you pass for white?





BECERRA:

Yes, in this regard, okay? Their attitude towards Mexicans is different, not on the basis of racial equality, but on the basis of that at least we’re not blacks, okay, number one. Number two, we’re still going to be just as dumb, just as dumb and dirty and lazy as ever, but at least we’re not blacks. When we were in [unclear], in all the ports that you go to where you have bases, naval bases, you go on liberty into the town and you go to where all the sailors hang out, so you go to the bars and the whorehouses. If you’re a sailor, that’s where you’re going to go. And the blacks would go to the black part of town. When I say black part of town, I don’t mean that there are black people living there; I mean the black bars. The same Japanese might own the same bars, but you didn’t go to the same bars where blacks—and maybe not even to the same whorehouses as the blacks. It was separate.





ESPINO:

Even in Japan?





BECERRA:

In Japan, yeah. I mean, I saw the movie Sayonara, too, but it doesn’t matter. This is Japan, and, yeah, the Japanese were racist too.





ESPINO:

You don’t think it was a U.S. military philosophy trickling down on to the Japanese culture? You think it was the Japanese themselves setting up the segregated—



00:47:2400:49:19

BECERRA:

No, it was Japanese business. I’ll tell you why. If you have a bar and got all these white southern drunks and black drunks in the same bar, guess what’s going to happen? [laughs] What’s going to happen is exactly what was happening in the Philippines in 1965. The fleet would come into Olongapo Bay. All the sailors would go ashore. The gate was here, and you had to go maybe three or four miles, five miles to where the ships were. So you’d be picked up not by buses, but what were called the cattle trucks, cattle wagons. Cattle trucks, I think we called them, cattle wagons. They were diesel trucks with huge trailers, and they’d throw all the drunk sailors in there and they’d go by the piers, "Okay, we’re at this ship, these three ships." These sailors would stumble off, bam, you know, all drunk, go to the ship.

Okay. Well, what happened, they’d have all these drunk sailors on these trucks, you know, and, sure enough, you have a race riot, bam, [unclear], just bam, bam, bam. And then they’d go on the ship and they’d have race riots on the ships. The difference was that after the riot was over, the people who would be prosecuted would only be the black sailors. The white sailors were not prosecuted. So it was a big scandal in the Congress over that. How come only the black sailors are being prosecuted in the race riot? A race riot, there’s going to be at least two races, right? No, only the black sailors.

So in Japan, one time we were in a bar and we told this one black sailor to meet us at the bar where we were. His name was Curtis. They called him Curt, but here they would call him Pete. Okay. Pete was not a southern black man. He was from L.A., and not only was he from L.A., but he was from Baldwin Hills, L.A., okay? [laughs] He didn’t have time for this trash from Appalachia in the navy, right, or from Alabama or Georgia, and he would be pissed. He says, "I’ve got to sleep with these motherfuckers." In the berth where he was, there was, like, fifty sailors, and we slept stacked four high. We didn’t have bunk beds. We had hammocks, okay, but they were modern hammocks, but they were still hammocks, and four high. I think we were only two or three high where I slept. So we’ve got fifty guys, and he slept with a knife under his pillow every night.

He says, "Look. I don’t know if one of these motherfuckers is going to come back in here and think he’s still in Alabama or Mississippi. He’s going to come here drunk, looking for some nigger to go lynch, and I’ve got to be ready for these motherfuckers. I’m the only black man down there. They’re going to come down there. I’m the only one they’re going to find. I said, "Goddamn, I wouldn’t want to be in your position." At least where I was at, there were more Mexicans and everybody identified as a Chicano. Sure, we fought with each other, but we also stuck together.

So one day we’re in this bar and we had told Pete to meet us there. So Pete walks into the bar. "Hey, there you are. Hey, come over here, Pete." And the Japanese bartenders, they run to him. They said, "No, no, no, no, you can’t come in here. No, can’t come in here." And it wasn’t because they were racist. That was the rule, you know, because you’re not going to have drunk blacks and drunk whites in the same bar anywhere because something’s going to happen, especially since all these southerners—one time I’m sitting down in the mess on the ship at sea and I’m talking to this one white guy from Oregon, but he was country, and this black sailor comes to sit at our table, and I always talk with them, you know. We’re sailors on the sea. We’re shipmates. We always talk, you know?

The white guy stands up and leaves the table. He says, "I may have to live with these motherfuckers, but I don’t have to eat with them," and he left. Jesus Christ. This is the world, right? So when Pete walked into the bar and they tried to stop him, we walked up, said, "Wait a minute. He’s with us." We had never in our lives seen something like that, that somebody, because he was a different race, could not go into the bar. I said, "Goddamn, it’s like being in Alabama or something," right? And then we realized why they were doing it. They were going to have bar riots every day, every time, because all this stuff is going to come out, the resentment and the bitterness of the blacks and the racism of these whites who didn’t hide it. Yeah, it was going to come out. You could have riots. And sure enough, in the Philippines it was happening. It happened.





ESPINO:

Did you ever witness an encounter between one of those southern whites and an African American?





BECERRA:

No, no, because usually the southern whites would say stuff when there were no African Americans around. I could talk about these issues to the African Americans and I could talk to some of the whites, right, not all the whites. It depends where the whites were from. If they were from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, you know, Chicago, you could. There was no problem, and they would see it from the southerners—but, of course, if you were from the North, a white northern, you knew that the South was white trash, you know, and so you always had that attitude toward southern whites. And they weren’t far off the mark, for the most part. They were really, really racist, you know.





ESPINO:

What about the hierarchy in the military, like coming from the top down? Was that racism also coming from the top down within the leadership of the military, like the sergeant? I don’t know how it would work.





BECERRA:

The big officers?





ESPINO:

Yeah.



00:53:29

BECERRA:

No. You could say, like, at the sergeant level, the chief petty officers, they were enough careerists to not instigate anything like that, but the officers themselves were the exact opposite of racism. They were professionals. They wanted to see a very—how would you say it—a military unit that got along very, very well. They didn’t have time for racism. They hated racism and they would demonstrate it. No, military officers were probably leaders in integration, from what I saw. That was my experience. They were not leaders in segregation.

Now, if I was to go to the Officers’ Club and there were southern officers there, that might be different, but I didn’t see that. All the officers that I saw in the military were the exact opposite, and that I would see later on in civilian life, guys who were ex-air force officers and stuff, no, they were the guys who would be the most anti-racist, the most pro-integration of anybody. They didn’t have time for that.





ESPINO:

Did you ever think about why, why that was?



00:55:01

BECERRA:

Yeah. The military needed a very coherent war machine. They needed for sailors to be able to get along, right? The fragging that took place in Vietnam was going to be more racial than it was because somebody hated an officer. One brother that I was with, I worked with at Northrop, an African American, in Vietnam he was in a combat unit. They were going to go out on their patrol. These two southerners had decided they were going to kill this black guy because he was black. They’re racist, right, when they’re out on patrol. So this other white soldier se dio cuenta and said, "They’re going to put you on point. They’re going to kill you while they’re out there, so we’re going to work around that."

So they did. So when they went out, he told me, "We killed them. We killed those two guys, [unclear] shot by the enemy, dragged their bodies back." But that was not with officers; that was with the enlisted men. On our ship, no. I knew who the racists were. They were all southerners and they hung out together and they resented the African Americans, but the machine, no, the machine was opposed to—I mean they can’t have that kind of an army where everybody’s killing each other on the basis of race. So if you’re a military officer, you have an education, you should know better, and then this is the policy of the military. You’re going to enforce that policy and you’re going to change your mind. You’re going to be surprised. If you’re a career officer, you’re going to be surprised how quickly you’re going to learn not to be a racist and to enforce the policy of the military, which is integration, you know, racial harmony.





ESPINO:

Were they outnumbered, the racists?





BECERRA:

I would say yes, quite a bit, quite a bit. The majority of the white sailors who were not racist like that, they were not like the southerners. Big difference. They would have nothing to do with the southerners. Like I said, they considered them trash. They would not hang out with them. They would prefer to hang out with a northern black or a Mexican or a Jew than a southern white. They didn’t like them. They didn’t like them at all.





ESPINO:

Did you have Asians in the navy when you were serving?



00:58:39

BECERRA:

Yeah, one officer and he was fresh from ROTC school, right off the campus and everything [unclear]. He became a joke to the guys, because, "If we’re going to start shooting at the Vietnamese, you’d better go hide now." Shit like that. I mean, there was no mercy for him, and even though he was Japanese and where our ship was stationed in Japan, but he was Japanese American and maybe he didn’t speak Japanese, right? Because some parents, certainly the grandmothers here, would want their children to speak Japanese. I had a friend at Northrop, his father was African American, he met a Japanese girl when he was stationed in Japan, married her. So his mama was Japanese. His grandmother was English, and so his father was, like, half black, half English. So he had, like, English in him, too, besides African American, and he looked African American. So then he goes to Harlingen to work on a contract for General Dynamics in aerospace, right, and he meets a Chicana from Texas and so he marries her, comes back to California, they have a baby. And so the baby, he looks more like his mama than like him, right? He’s got these huge eyes, you know. And I start laughing because he doesn’t have those Japanese eyes that my friend has, right? He’s got a lot of the African American features, but Japanese eyes, the smaller eyes. And I started laughing when I saw his boy’s eyes. He goes, "He’s got my eyes, huh?"

So his mother, the grandmother of that baby, right, that half Chicano baby, tells him, "I’ve been looking around and I found the perfect school for him," and she’s Japanese. [laughs] Didn’t matter to her. That was her baby, her grandchild, you know. If he’s half Mexican, half English, he’s Japanese. Like any grandma who’s Japanese, she wants him in a Japanese school learning Japanese, right? But maybe this officer that I was with, maybe he didn’t have a mother or a grandmother like that, and so in Japan he would be speaking English and be lost, so it would be embarrassing because I’m sure [unclear]. And, look, they came up to me. I’m in Yokohama walking the street, you know, in civilian clothes, and a cab driver pulls over and he moves over to me asking me for directions. He thinks I’m Japanese. [laughs] Anywhere I go, I could pass for a Turk, I could pass—I was in a meeting of Arab Americans, and they come up to me speaking in Arabic thinking that I’m Arabic, right? So we could pass for everything.





ESPINO:

Some of us, yeah.





BECERRA:

Some of us, yeah.





ESPINO:

Some of us look more one thing. Some of us look like many different things.





BECERRA:

[unclear].





ESPINO:

Yeah, you do look—





BECERRA:

I look like a Japanese [unclear].





ESPINO:

Yeah, you do look really mutt-like. [laughter] Wow. That’s interesting. Jeez, I can’t imagine what that would be like.





BECERRA:

The officer was the only one who was Japanese and, no, unfortunately, people didn’t take him serious, first of all, not because he’s Japanese, but because he was a new officer. He was a jaygee, a lieutenant, junior grade, and so all junior grades are going to be treated with a lack of respect by all the sailors, so that’s the first thing against him. The fact that he was Japanese American just added to that, you know, as far as joking around with.





ESPINO:

Well, especially in the military culture, there was a hatred towards the Japanese from people who served in World War II or whose parents served in World War II, there was a strong—because of the bombing, and then you had Vietnam. So what you read about the men that served the U.S. during that period, they were inculcated with a hatred towards Asian. You know the derogatory names that they used to call them. So I brought that up, wondering what it would be like for an Asian person to have to be in this military when you’re at a war with an Asian country.





BECERRA:

Yeah. Where I slept, there was maybe like thirty of us on one side and maybe thirty sailors on the other side. No, not thirty. Maybe like fifteen, twenty sailors. They spoke very little English. There was a special program, maybe it still exists, where the Filipino sailors could join the U.S. Navy—it was a tradition—but they served as stewards, okay, served the officers, like servants for the officers.





ESPINO:

And butlers.





BECERRA:

Yeah, the butlers, valets, you know, ironing the clothes, washing the clothes.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

And we were [unclear] speaking Tagalog, and so [unclear], "They’re talking that gook talk again." All Asians were "gooks," whether they were from the Philippines, anywhere, China, Japan. Didn’t matter; they were all gooks. "They’re talking that gook shit again," because you could hear them talk because they’d be laughing and joking, right? So, yeah, that attitude against Asians, yeah, it was there, and I didn’t see it so much as a racist thing, for the most part, as a macho thing, that it’s us and the gooks, right? And so they said it, like, trying to be como atrevidos that you dare to say something like that. Of course, the result, of course, was racism because the guys would go—it might have been on the base of machismo, but it was still, any way you slice it, the attitude was still going to be there because when you go into a port and the attitude they would have towards the native population was always the same. If they were gooks, "Fucking gooks," this and "fucking gooks" all the time.





ESPINO:

In Japan?





BECERRA:

In Japan, in the Philippines, in China. In Thailand, not so much. We weren’t there long enough.





ESPINO:

So when you were in the navy, you traveled to Japan, to the Philippines, and what other countries?



01:05:11

BECERRA:

We were in Hong Kong, China, also across the strait to Taiwan and Taipei. I think it was Taipei we were at, and Formosa, and then we went around Indochina to the other side to Bangkok, Thailand, and we were in Thailand also, but we were only there for, like, five days, and it was like a totally different universe when we went there. That was Thailand before it was ruined, because there was really—it’s not the same Thailand anymore, Bangkok especially. When we went in there, there were very few Americans that had been there, very few military, and the very few military who were there were like at secret bases, so nobody really saw Americans. So we went there and we were the only Americans that people were seeing. They would see other sailors from other countries, they were merchant seamen, but military, no.

In fact, it was against the law for any military police to be ashore, because we had to have our own military police shore patrol as [unclear], and so there were no shore patrols. So we went, "Great! We can do whatever the hell we want," which basically we did because we were with girls. [unclear] put on your hat. You’re supposed to be uniform. Nah, we’d take off our hat, go put it on, take off our shirt [unclear] be wearing part of the uniform, walking down the street like that. Nobody can say anything to you because there’s no shore patrol.

The guys got into a fight in a bar. They were all down at the bar, onto the street, and it was a main street, you know, maybe four lanes this way, four lanes that way. The police saw them and the police come running over, but they won’t interfere because these are American sailors. They don’t want any problems. So the guys [unclear] in uniform and we were in whites, our white uniforms. So finally we broke the guys up. We broke it up [unclear] police [unclear], "We’ll take care of it. Don’t worry." So we went back with them. But these guys always fought all the time. I mean, drunk sailors, that’s what’s going to happen, right? But the land was beautiful, beautiful. Okay, I’ll tell you the story. It’s really, like, a real male chauvinist story, but if you’re a sailor and—





ESPINO:

And you’re a male chauvinist? [laughs]



01:07:28

BECERRA:

—and when you hit port, you’ve only got one thing on your mind. So you go to the bars and you’re going to go either to the whorehouses or pick up a girl in a bar, right? So I pick up a girl in a bar, and she takes me home, right? I mean, this is oral history, so I’ll tell you what happened, okay? So to get to her house we have to take a boat, [unclear] like canoes, but they have motors on them because she lives in, like, a hut that’s on stilts over the river. And so I said, "Wow." So we get off the boat, into her house, and the bed is on the floor, right, a mattress and a long pillow and a net, a red net. It was a mosquito net, a very pretty one, right? When you live on the river, you’ve got to have a mosquito net, and so she has that. And I mean she—I feel like a goddamn king, man, because she feeds you food in your mouth. I said, "Fuck, I think I’ve died and gone to heaven," right? Besides the sex and everything else, right? Jesus Christ, you know?

And what struck me when I was there, I couldn’t believe how beautiful these Thai girls were. I thought, "My god, they’re so beautiful," and I can’t figure out why. Then I realized what had happened. They looked like Chicanas. That’s why they were so beautiful. It took a while to figure it out, beautiful long black hair, big brown eyes. I thought, "Jesus Christ, that’s why they look so beautiful." I haven’t seen a Chicana in years, all right? Two years I hadn’t seen Chicanas and now I’ve finally seen them, right, but they’re Thais. They’re Thai women, you know? And we were treated so well everywhere we went.





ESPINO:

But she wasn’t a prostitute?





BECERRA:

Of course.





ESPINO:

Okay, so you were paying for these services?





BECERRA:

Yes. Yes, I mean, the girls make their living—





ESPINO:

I just was wondering—[laughs]





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Because you said "picked her up," so I wasn’t sure if you meant picked her up, like, you know you pick up a girl in the bar and whatever. But she was a prostitute?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes.





ESPINO:

It wasn’t like there was some romance, you met a girl and there was a romance that blossomed?[laughs]





BECERRA:

No, I’m surprised because, like here, you know, you go to a bar, you pick up a fichera, well, of course that’s the relationship you’re going to have, right? You could maybe develop some kind of relationship later on, but the way you meet, if she’s a fichera, of course you’re going to pay. The girl’s making a living, right? So, yeah. But all the things they told us that things were different, trying to make us, like, culturally sensitive, you know, "Don’t cross your feet and point your toe at somebody because that’s an insult."





ESPINO:

They educated you like that?





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Who did?



01:09:39

BECERRA:

The military. They told us we had to have classes on that. "You guys are going to go in here like American ambassadors, goodwill ambassadors, so you have to learn how to respect these people’s culture." So, yeah, back in 1965, they taught us that and they said, "They’re going to see if things. If you see a lizard going up the wall, leave it there. Those are their pets," those lizards that would kill the mosquitoes and the bugs in the house.

So sure enough, we went to a—because, you know, you still go to the whorehouse, not just the bar. So we’re sitting in the whorehouse and we’re waiting, and I forget if I was waiting my turn or if I was waiting for somebody else, you know, and I seen the lizards crawling up the walls. That’s what they’re there for. And then, too, is that the prostitution then is not like the prostitution today, okay?





ESPINO:

I wouldn’t know. [laughs]





BECERRA:

Huh?





ESPINO:

I wouldn’t know. [laughs]





BECERRA:

Oh, no. Then, you know, the girls are making a living, and you go there, you talk with them, you have a few drinks with them, go to a motel, come back. Next you go to a different bar, the same girl, right? But what happened as a result of the military buildup and all kinds of military personnel, a whole industry of prostitution developed and a lot of gangsterism and the nightclub owners, you know, they just flourished, and, of course, human trafficking and children trafficking, totally different worlds. It was not like it was then.





ESPINO:

So you think that back then women made money for themselves, not for somebody else?





BECERRA:

Yes, most prostitutes do that. This idea of—





ESPINO:

Well, when you think of pimping and gangster and human sexual trafficking, that kind of thing, they’re not making money for themselves.





BECERRA:

It’s not like in this country, right?





ESPINO:

Well, I don’t know. I’m just wondering.





BECERRA:

I’m thinking if they’re working over there, I think they’re probably working for somebody else, not for themselves, okay. Today, okay, I think they’re working for somebody else because now it’s an industry, and like any industry, it’s going to be—you’ve got mass production, you’ve got to be a quota that’s got to be met, stuff like that.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

Of course, it’s not like you’re here. Pimps may represent maybe 5 percent of prostitution; 95 percent of girls work for themselves.





ESPINO:

Right. When you described it, you made it sound almost romantic. I really don’t know too much about prostitution or what it would be like, but I wouldn’t imagine—I mean, then you see the images on television and it doesn’t seem romantic. It doesn’t seem like there’s care and time taken with the individual, but the way you described it, it sounds like that.





BECERRA:

No, the way I—





ESPINO:

Like there’s some sort of tenderness. Like there’s tenderness. I guess that’s what I’m getting at.





BECERRA:

No, I think what it is is that there’s a certain amount of respect that you have for the girls, okay? You meet them. These are the only girls you can meet as a sailor. By exception you meet other girls. Like I had a girlfriend in Japan who was—at that time they called them a commercial artist. They might be graphic artists. I met her when we went to the clubs in Yokohama, and the Japanese go to those clubs, right, and that’s where you would meet Japanese girls that were not bar girls. And that’s how I met her. But for the most part, these are the only girls that you’re going to meet, and so unless you’re a racist, you know, you’re going to show the respect that you would any other girl that you met. You treat them like a girl, you know, not like a prostitute, or you treat the prostitute the way she should be treated, okay?





ESPINO:

I don’t know. [laughs]





BECERRA:

Like a girl, like anybody else, I mean, that you respect.





ESPINO:

Oh, uh-huh.





BECERRA:

And like a human being, okay. The relationship that you develop with the prostitutes, if you went to the same bar, you would see the same girl all the time. I never did. I would go to different bars and meet different girls and [unclear] a relationship with the girls in the bars, just because when I went to the bar I just want to get drunk, you know, and if I want to be with a girl, I’d just go to the whorehouse, you know. And sometimes I did, I guess. Maybe I went for the girls in the bar for the most part. But you asked me how the guys looked. This one boy from Mississippi, did I tell the story about him? He was from Mississippi and, like a lot of guys, he fell in love with one of the girls in the bars. The sailors who married the girls, who married, for the most part, the girls from the bars.





ESPINO:

Prostitutes.





BECERRA:

Yes, and then they stop being prostitutes and started, you know, I think, maybe living on the base and stuff like that. So this guy, he falls in love with this girl. She was a beautiful girl, and so he married her. They even had a Shinto wedding, and we went to the wedding, but the military would not recognize the wedding because in order to be married, you had to have the permission of the commanding officer. It was a very racist attitude that they had, "Look, you’re only marrying her because you’re lonely or away from home, and it’s not because you’re in love." So you would have to have permission of the commanding officer to be able to get married. Jeez. You might as well be a Mexican daughter from some rancho in Mexico to go and get permission of your parents. So he married her and then towards—





ESPINO:

So you had to prove you were in love or you just needed to get the permission?



01:15:55

BECERRA:

You needed the permission of the officer. I don’t know how you got it. So then this guy from Mississippi was really sad, talking to us, he was really sad because he says, "Look. Now, if I marry her, I can ask for permission to marry her, but if I marry her, I’m going to take her back home to Mississippi, Mississippi, and it’s not going to be long before somebody’s going to say something. I’m going to have to get my shotgun and go kill some son of a bitch." I said, "Well, don’t do it. Stay in California. Don’t go back to Mississippi."

"California? Goddamn." Says, "California’s full of nuts." I said, "Look, if you want the freedom to live with this girl, you’re going to have to move to California. Don’t move back to Mississippi. Stay in California. Take her back and live in California. That’s why California exists, for people like this." And, no, he wouldn’t do it. He could not stand the idea of going back to California, living in California with people who are different, people who accept racial equality and all this. It was too much for him. But, no, but I’m answering your question of how did the sailors look at the bar girls. That’s how you saw them, to the extent of marrying the girls, okay? And even though the girls, when you left, would have to work still. I mean, you’re not supporting them [unclear], and you’d come back and the guys would want to marry them and some of them would. But they were still the only girls that you really knew, all right, for the most part. And then, by exception, I got to meet a girl while I was there and in Japan. But for the most part, no, the guys would respect the girls.





ESPINO:

Why do you think that you never fell in love with any of the girls from the bar but you fell in love with this other one?





BECERRA:

Yeah, I really liked her a lot, you know.





ESPINO:

But what made her different?





BECERRA:

What made her different? First, she was not a prostitute, okay? She wasn’t working the bars, okay, number one. Number two, see, if the girl from the bar treats you nice, you know why she’s treating you nice, okay? And there’s money involved, right, and, sure, and you’re treating her nice, too, you know. The money’s there and there’s always that issue, right, but you still can treat her nice. With this other girl, if she treated me nice, which she did, it wasn’t because there was money involved, right? The reason she treated me nice, besides the fact that she liked me, is that she was very proud of being Japanese and she was going to show me how Japanese people treat guests, okay, not how a Japanese woman treats a man, okay, but how a Japanese person treats a guest. And that’s what she did. Her and the other girls, when we went on that island that I told you about and they ordered this great Japanese—in my whole life I’ll never see another dinner like this.

So they were very hospitable in the same way that Arabs are hospitable when you go to an Arab home. It’s like old world. So she treated me that way and, of course, you know, boyfriend-girlfriend type of a relationship too. So she treated me really, really nice, and those were things that were different. The girls in the bar were not going to be, like, middle-class like these girls were, okay? They were from the very poor class of Japanese, okay, the very poor, and that’s why they were working in these bars. All of a sudden you meet a girl who’s, like, more middle-class. Even if they’re working-class, they’re still not as poor as these other girls.

There were words that we would learn from the Japanese bar girls because [unclear] that we knew Japanese, too, right? And we would use it in front of these girls. They’d say, "No, don’t use those words. No, no. Those are bad words." Damn, we don’t know. We’re learning from the Japanese girls in the bars. That’s the Japanese that we were learning, right? Jesus Christ. It’s [unclear] can’t talk that way. Goddamn. But still, the girls that we knew in the bars, we still treated them with respect. We’re working-class, too, just like them, you know?





ESPINO:

So the girls who were more educated, they spoke English?





BECERRA:

Yes. The bar girls did too. Of course, if they’re going to make a living, they had to learn it, and the girls that were educated spoke it also.





ESPINO:

And they had these brothels in every single port that you land, in China—you said you were in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Japan, and Philippines? Each one had—





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

Look, let me tell you. The other day—





ESPINO:

A lot of prostitution.



01:21:37

BECERRA:

Oh, there’s even more now. The other day I was looking for a room, for a motel, and I was trying to get as cheap a room as I could get, right? At Denny’s and some McDonald’s there’s a magazine for discounted hotel rates. So there was one in Wilmington. It’s called the Brothel. So I called them up. I said, "Hey, I want to know about the room. Tell me the history of this place."

He goes, "Oh, this used to be a brothel. It’s in Wilmington," which at one time was full of sailors just [unclear], so this used to be a brothel. "So we’ve changed it and made it to a motel, but it used to be a brothel." But, yeah, everywhere, everywhere.





ESPINO:

And did they primarily serve the military or do you think they served locals as well?





BECERRA:

No. They may have served locals, too, but for the most part—for example, in Yokosuka it would have been the military because it’s a military base. In Yokohama it would be mostly merchant seamen who would come in, and military sailors would be an exception. It would mostly be merchant seamen who would come in. They had a lot more money, too, than we did. They got paid good. I’m telling it to you very matter-of-factly because that’s exactly the way it is, very matter-of-factly, that’s the way it is. I’ve read other critiques of this by feminists who criticize this, and this happens to the women that are there and that’s true. But as long as it’s a way to make a living and women are going to do that—these women were not being trafficked, okay? They didn’t have pimps. These were very, very independent women, and almost everywhere we went, that’s the way it was. But when they criticize us, you know, it’s not something that just developed with the U.S. military. This goes back thousands of years. As long as there were sailors, you know, there was going to be this industry. They aren’t called the oldest profession for nothing. You know, it’s been there. Anyway, that’s what it was. It’s not like the Japanese, you know, recruiting the hospitality women in Korea.





ESPINO:

Or kidnapping.





BECERRA:

Yeah. Yeah, putting them in to serve the military, or like the Nazis, you know, the German soldiers rounding up Jewish women to rape and then keeping their secret because, you know, it’s too embarrassing, not the rape, but the fact that they were Jewish women that they’d had the—you know, that kind of thing.





ESPINO:

Right.





BECERRA:

[unclear], okay?





ESPINO:

So you felt like these women had some kind of agency, some kind of power in that business transaction?





BECERRA:

Yes, they decided the price, they decided when, they decided with who, they decided your rates, they decided everything. You’re not going to stop it. They decided whether or not they were going to be with you or not.





ESPINO:

Were you ever rejected?





BECERRA:

Yes, because the girl was waiting for her boyfriend, quote, "boyfriend" coming from another—he was going to come in, and she was going to go with him, okay?





ESPINO:

So it sounds like there was all this coded language. You didn’t really talk bluntly about, like you said in quotes, "the boyfriend," meaning that wasn’t really a boyfriend. And then you said, "pick her up," as if you were meeting a girl at a bar and becoming friendly and then taking her to her place.





BECERRA:

You still did that. You still did that very much. First of all, you’re a sailor, you’re away from home, you want to have a girl to talk to. You could spend an hour, two hours, three hours talking with her before you ever went. You didn’t just come in and say, "Hey, let’s go." No, that didn’t happen.





ESPINO:

Oh, okay.



01:26:22

BECERRA:

No, no. [laughs] No, no. You spent quite a bit of time and then you might come back for the same girl while you’re in port and see the same girl all the time. So, yeah, that’s why these guys would fall in love and get married, you know, because that was—you treat them like human beings, you know. If you went to a brothel, okay, that’s different, okay, because there you may not even know who you’re going to be with. The mamasan would bring out one of the girls, "Here. Go." That’s just the way it was. She didn’t have any choice and you didn’t have any choice, okay? Whoever the mamasan decided the matter, right, that was who you were going to be with. Yeah, there, that’s just the way it is. You just don’t know.

And here, you know, you go to a—I’ve never been to one, but I know that when you go there, to all the brothels here, because hundreds of brothels probably here, you get to choose the girl, okay? But over there at those brothels, you didn’t.





ESPINO:

So you never got the feeling that they didn’t want to do what they were doing?





BECERRA:

Oh, the bar girls?





ESPINO:

Well, either, the bar girls or the women in the brothels, like they were being forced into this kind of business relationship, not really wanting to?





BECERRA:

Okay, when you’re nineteen, twenty years old, you don’t even think about these things, you know? You just know that you’re going to go there. The girls works there. The mamasan is going to bring a girl out. She’s going to tell you, "This one." And you say, "Well, no." "Okay, this one." "No, no, you go with this one." The mamasan would get mad and scold you and tell you, "No, you’re going to go with this one." So that’s who you’re going with, yeah. But as far as like me getting the feeling like they were being forced, no. First of all, it wasn’t even on your mind, okay?





ESPINO:

You didn’t care.





BECERRA:

No, we didn’t think about it. It wasn’t that you didn’t care. If I thought somebody was being forced, yeah, I would care, you know? Even at twenty years old, I would care, but it never entered your mind that they were doing something they didn’t want to do. That’s what they did, you know?





ESPINO:

It was a whole part of the culture. It was a part of the culture of serving in the navy.





BECERRA:

Yes, or being a merchant seaman or just being a sailor of any type.





ESPINO:

Yeah.





BECERRA:

The girls in the bars was totally different. They decided who they’d go with or not go with. Yeah, they decided those things.





ESPINO:

So were you getting any messages about—I mean, if it was so much a part of the culture, were you getting any messages about STDs or birth control or getting women pregnant or that kind of thing? I mean, did they give out free condoms as you guys went on leave?





BECERRA:

They would talk to us about it. In boot camp they showed you pictures, "This is what—." And it scared the hell out of you. It was like being scared straight, right? And they would tell us to use condoms, right? But once you were in the bar and you were drinking and you saw the girl, you didn’t think about condoms and you went and had sex. And if you got sick, you know, a few days later, you were getting shots. At the time, there was no AIDS, okay, and the only true venereal diseases that were common was gonorrhea and syphilis. If you got gonorrhea, they treated you as if you had gotten syphilis because what’s going to happen, the symptoms for gonorrhea showed first. If they treat you for gonorrhea, it’s going to hide the symptoms of syphilis, so they treated you as if you had syphilis and they gave you a series of shots. So that’s how you paid for unsafe sex, what today you would call unsafe sex, but you knew that you were cured, and that was it. And people very seldom got sick. I don’t know why. They very seldom got sick.





ESPINO:

And you’re talking about a culture of people who did use condoms? I mean, it wasn’t like part of—just trying to imagine what the mindset was at the time. You’re pretty regularly going to see prostitutes and you don’t think that—and you know that these are prostitutes and are probably having sex with a lot of other different men.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

You’re not worried about—





BECERRA:

No. Let me tell you why you’re not worried. Number one, you said you’re very frequently going to see—no, we’re not. We’re at sea for a month or two months at a time, number one, so we’re not seeing them very frequently. Number two, when you’ve been at sea for a month—[laughs]





ESPINO:

And you’re twenty or nineteen or whatever.





BECERRA:

Yeah. Yeah, you know? No, that’s going to be the last thing on your mind, okay?





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

You’re going to come in like any sailor who’s been at sea for a month, twenty years old, you know, going crazy, right? At sea you don’t worry about it, okay, you don’t worry about it, and there’s Playboy magazines and stuff like that, and when the officer come by, "Don’t look at those things." [laughs] Okay. So, no, you didn’t think about—you’re twenty, you’re going crazy because you’ve been at sea for—and you come in and see the girls. You don’t come in raping women, you know, like in the old days what the pirates used to do or something, you know. You go in and you meet a girl in a bar and you start talking. "Hi, how are you? Will you buy me a drink?" "Sure." And you start talking with her, and the girl, for the most part, she’s interested. She makes her money from the drinks, okay, and she’s not going to want to go right away to the bar. The bar may tell her, "If you leave with somebody, don’t come back, because we want you here making money for the bar selling drinks."





ESPINO:

Ah.





BECERRA:

Okay?





ESPINO:

Uh-huh.





BECERRA:

So it will be like towards the end of the night that she’ll go with you, okay?





ESPINO:

When the bar’s going to close?





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

That kind of thing?





BECERRA:

Yeah. And sometimes they’ll go before that, but for the most part, the bartender tells her, "If you’re going to work here, you make money for me before you run out and make money for yourself." So it wasn’t like the girls were going in and out of the bars, okay, and it wasn’t like we were there every day. We were there just when we were in port. We’d be out at sea for a month, come in for four days, back out at sea for a month, come in for three days, because there was a war. There was a war going on, and it wasn’t like during peacetime. You had to be at the front all the time, all the time, so we didn’t get to be in port very often. One time we were at sea for, I think, sixty-four days, sixty-four days without—you know. Goddamn, you know? So when you come in, you know, you only got one thing on your mind, you know, and that’s the way it is.





ESPINO:

Was there a taboo about condoms at that time?





BECERRA:

No, they wanted you to use condoms. They encouraged it.





ESPINO:

The women did. What about the women themselves, like if they would have suggested it, would it have been—because you know some men feel like that’s not the same experience.





BECERRA:

I can’t remember—oh, I feel it’s not the same experience right today, you know? No, I cannot remember—





ESPINO:

[laughs] [unclear] we were talking [unclear]. Okay.





BECERRA:

But, no, nobody ever said you had to use a condom, not the girls. Only the military told us, and they weren’t there when we were there, when we were with the girl.





ESPINO:

Right, right, right, right, right. Wow, that’s all very interesting. But like you said, I think today it would probably be a lot different because of the AIDS scare.





BECERRA:

Yes. Yes, today it would be very, very different. Sometimes I think if my son ever decided he wanted to go in the military, I want him to go in the navy, you know, but then I think, goddamn it, I don’t want him to be like me. You know, you’ve got to use condoms, but people are being raised in a different culture about using condoms, you know, for good reason. But, no, at that time, no, we didn’t think about that. [laughs]





ESPINO:

But I’m thinking, like, for example, just the whole period of sexuality at that time, because women didn’t have access to a lot of birth control. I don’t even think the Pill was available. So how would the women deal with that kind of situation? And I don’t mean just abroad; I mean here locally. I mean, you said you had a girlfriend, and some of the other people I interviewed, they also had girlfriends, and other women, too, I’m interviewing. It was a really complicated thing trying not to get pregnant.





BECERRA:

No. If I’m in Japan or in China, for example, they have their cultures that are centuries, millenniums old, and the issue of unwanted pregnancy is not going to be something new to them and they’re not going to be like here, clothes-hanger time. Here, the clothes-hanger because there was no access to abortions, right? Over there, medications that are available over there are not available here. Cures available—like there’s pills that I’ve heard of that will cure a heroin addict. It will cure him. He doesn’t have to go on methadone. It will just cure him. It’s used in other countries, but not here, okay? So there were other things a woman could do to avoid pregnancy and things that were available to them over there, in terms of abortion and stuff like that, that were not available here, so I don’t think that that was as much of a problem overseas as it was here. We had to have a Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion in this country. No, I don’t think in the ports of Yokohama and Hong Kong and—no, I don’t think that was going to be an issue.





ESPINO:

But I mean would you even want to get to that point of getting pregnant? Would you even, as a woman, would you want to get pregnant, allow pregnancy, knowing that abortion was available, or would you want to avoid pregnancy altogether?



01:37:54

BECERRA:

You know, I think the women did everything they had to do to avoid pregnancy, things that we didn’t know about, okay, and I don’t mean just being operated on. Maybe they used spermicides. Maybe they used all kinds of other things to avoid pregnancies, because all those things were available too. In fact, in high school, one of the guys told me that his girlfriend used some kind of foam, right? So there was a lot of things that were available to the women to avoid pregnancy. Women here that maybe came from cultures where they did not want to talk about those things to their daughters, maybe that’s different. Like, I didn’t want to talk about sex to my daughter. I was so happy when my daughter comes in. She’s in eighth grade and she’s having sex education. "What did they teach you?" "Oh, Daddy, he showed us—." I think it was a banana or a cucumber. "Shows us how you put on a condom."

I said, "Okay." I couldn’t do that with my daughter. Jesus Christ, you know? So I’m glad the teachers were able to do that. But in those days, maybe there wasn’t that education, so the girls were just not going to know.





ESPINO:

Right, right.





BECERRA:

Culturally, you don’t teach that to your daughter, not the mother, nothing.





ESPINO:

Right, right. So then what did you do? Did you worry about it yourself?





BECERRA:

About getting somebody pregnant over there?





ESPINO:

Yeah, or here or anywhere before you got married. Or was it the woman’s responsibility to worry about it?





BECERRA:

[laughs] You know, I don’t know. Even here I don’t ever remember using condoms, not with any of the women I was with, not with my wives, ever. Ever, ever, I don’t remember ever—





ESPINO:

So birth control was the woman’s responsibility in your relationships.





BECERRA:

Which, the STD or the—





ESPINO:

Birth control, just birth control.





BECERRA:

Just birth control?





ESPINO:

Uh-huh.





BECERRA:

You make me sound like an asshole. [laughs]





ESPINO:

I’m not trying to. [laughs] I’m not trying to make you sound like an ass. It’s a good question, and I’ve asked it of some other people, too, and women too. What did you do? Because that’s a big issue. If a woman gets pregnant, it can change her whole life. It doesn’t necessarily change the man’s life. It could—





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

—but not necessarily. But for the woman, it’s an important question.





BECERRA:

Yeah, I never even thought about it, okay, until she would tell me that she’s pregnant, okay? Then I would think about it. But I’m married. Let’s see. I can only think about it recently in the last twenty years—that’s how old I am—only getting two women pregnant, you know, and one, I had a heart attack.





ESPINO:

Like a real heart attack?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

Like you or she didn’t want to be pregnant?





BECERRA:

No, she wanted the baby.





ESPINO:

No, but you didn’t want her to be pregnant. That’s why you had a heart attack, like, meaning—





BECERRA:

No, I didn’t care.





ESPINO:

Oh.





BECERRA:

I think if she wants to have a baby, fine, we’ll have a baby, you know?





ESPINO:

Well, you said you had a heart attack.



01:41:54

BECERRA:

Yeah, because this is the kind of thing you have to be careful who you get pregnant. I’d always go to her house, you know, with a bag of lemons and a bottle of tequila, and she’d pull out the weed, right? And I’m already in my fifties, right? And so we’d drink tequila, smoke weed. So then what happened, I go over there one day, you know, and she tells me, "I’m pregnant." "You sure you’re pregnant?" She says, "Yeah." I said, "Well, what do you want to do? You want to terminate the pregnancy or do you want to have the baby?" She says, "I want to have the baby." I said, "Okay, fine with me. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m with you. Whatever we did, we do together." She says, "Okay." So then I stand up and I get the bottle of tequila and the bag of lemons and I go to the door to walk back to the car. She says, "Where are you going?" I said, "I’m going to go put this away. I’ll be right back." She said, "What do you mean, you’re going to put it away?" I said, "You’re pregnant. We’re not going to be drinking and smoking weed when you’re pregnant." She says, "Why not?"

I said, "Jesus Christ." Oh, we got into an argument over that. I said, "Because you’re pregnant. You can harm the fetus. You can harm the baby. You can’t be doing that." "Well, I had those two children and they’re fine," which wasn’t true. The girl was fine. The boy was not, okay? He had learning disabilities, but I don’t know if it was because she drank and smoked weed when she was pregnant, and the last thing you’re going to do is tell a mother he’s like that because this is what you did.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

Because first of all, I don’t know that, and you don’t do that to a mom, you know? And I don’t know that that’s the reason he has learning disabilities, you know? I don’t think her smoking weed and drinking helped, you know, but you’re not going to tell her that. And I’d seen that before where the mom drank a lot, the baby was born with learning disabilities. I’d seen it, you know?





ESPINO:

Yeah.



01:43:13

BECERRA:

So then I thought, "Goddamn, what are we going to do?" So we had arguments over that. I was pissed. Finally, one day she says, "Well," she says, "I’m not pregnant anymore. It was a water bag." So I said, "It was? Well, how come you tested positive for a pregnancy if it was a water bag?"

She says, "I don’t know." So now I don’t know if she was just testing me, you know, because she really wasn’t pregnant, if she really did have a water bag, or if she terminated the pregnancy, or if she had a miscarriage. It could be any one of those four things.





ESPINO:

Yeah.





BECERRA:

And I didn’t know. But, boy, it scared me because then I thought, "Man, I’ve got to be careful who I get pregnant. I’ve got to think about using condoms.[laughs] I’ve got to be careful about who I get pregnant," right?





ESPINO:

So you came to that when you were fifty years old, that you had to worry about—





BECERRA:

Yeah. But remember, I’d been married for, like, twenty years.





ESPINO:

Oh, okay.



01:44:16

BECERRA:

But even then, you know, when I was thirty years old and my wife got pregnant—you know, I tell my daughters, "Be careful. Think about it. I want you to get pregnant and I want you to have babies, lots of them, but the first month I was with your mama, we got pregnant." Jesus Christ, you know, we were crazy. It was crazy, every day, all the time.

Then one day she’s nauseous and she tells, "Oh, I feel nauseous." Oh, she feels sick, so I run to get her some medicine at the drugstore for nauseous, and the nausea doesn’t go away. She’s throwing up, and I’m thinking, "Oh, my god, I think maybe she’s got the flu." I had no idea. So she comes back—





ESPINO:

And she didn’t know either?





BECERRA:

No. So she goes to see the doctor. She’s not getting better. She comes back and she said, "I’m pregnant." And I think—I can’t figure out how did that happen. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Wow. Wow. [laughs]





BECERRA:

How did that happen? Duh. What have you been doing for the last thirty days all day, all night, you know? I mean literally all day, all night, you know, and it never entered my mind that she was going to get pregnant. So I had my first baby—





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

—my first little girl. But, no, I’d never think about that, you know.





ESPINO:

And she wasn’t either, obviously, or—





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

—you weren’t talking about it. You didn’t have a discussion.





BECERRA:

No, we’re just having a ball, you know, we’re having fun. And all of a sudden she’s pregnant with our first child, you know, and of course it changes everything. But, I mean, I love my little girl. I was so happy.





ESPINO:

How old were you?





BECERRA:

[laughs] Let’s see. Jeez. I was thirty, thirty years—





ESPINO:

Oh, you were already thirty.





BECERRA:

I was thirty.





ESPINO:

Oh, okay.





BECERRA:

But, see, the other [unclear] about men, we never change, okay, no matter what. We stay the same, you know? That’s why you’re thinking, "Oh, [unclear] don’t change. [unclear]."





ESPINO:

[laughs] Whew! Okay. I think that’s pretty good for now. We should probably stop here. I’m going to turn it off.

Session Three (May 20, 2013)





ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is May 20, 2013. I’m interviewing Cruz Becerra, previously Cruz Olmeda, at his home in Commerce, California. Today I want to start with—well, you mentioned that you were serving in the navy during the Vietnam War, but we didn’t get a chance to talk about what impact the war had on your life, on your day-to-day life as a person in the military, but also ideologically, intellectually it was something that was in the news a lot and people were starting to develop opinions about our role. Can you tell me what you were thinking or how it affected you, even though you weren’t actually in Vietnam, how it impacted you?



00:02:01

BECERRA:

Well, initially when we went over there, it was very superficial. I was conservative, politically I was conservative, not so far as being a Chicano, because there I wasn’t conservative. We all knew we were Chicanos and we understood what racism was because we’d grown up seeing it. But as far as like the Cold War is concerned, I was a conservative in that regard. When our ship left Pearl Harbor, we were headed for Yokosuka, Japan, and halfway there we were rerouted to Vietnam to the Tonkin Gulf to go on patrol. We were upset because we were sailors. We didn’t join the navy to go to war; we joined the navy to be sailors, to have fun, travel, especially if we were in port, because most of the guys in the navy when I was there, most of the guys came from poor backgrounds, no matter what your race was. Not everybody, but most of the guys.

So we went to the Tonkin Gulf and then back to Japan. Well, over a period of a year, there were things that would happen that we would see. The Tonkin Gulf incident, we were at sea when that occurred and we were in what was called Condition Yellow, not Condition Red, which meant precaution. There’s some things that you do on the ship to take precautions in case of an attack, we’re halfway ready for it. But it wouldn’t be till a year later that we would start figuring out that something was wrong with that issue of the Tonkin Gulf incident, where the Maddox and the Turner Joy supposedly were attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, and then Johnson takes it to the Congress and they pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing Johnson to bomb North Vietnam. Okay, so we were at sea when that incident was supposed to have occurred. A year later, our ship was being prepared to go on the same type of a mission, and we were not privy to all the details because we did not have secret clearances, but the guys in the radio shack, they did and they were pissed. They said, “These assholes are going to get us killed.” So we said, “What going on?”





ESPINO:

What assholes?



00:04:07

BECERRA:

The military. Because what was happening is once we were on our way to that mission, we were no longer under the control of what was called CinCPacFlt. CinCPacFlt stands for Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet out of Pearl Harbor. Okay, now we were directly under the control of Washington out of the Pentagon because we were going to go on a special mission, and what we were supposed to do was go up to the North Vietnamese coast, shell their oil refineries and anything else and lure them into coming out into the open sea and firing on us. Well, they had, like, 1,000 torpedo boats and we thought that was a suicide mission and we were pissed. You don’t join the navy for something like that.

And so that started us, that started getting us pissed, you know, because we’re not Marines, we’re not gung-ho. We’re sailors, right?





ESPINO:

You’re saying they train you differently?



00:05:10

BECERRA:

Oh, yeah. Hell, yes. I mean, when they train the Marines, “You’re a Marine, you’re a Marine for life,” blah, blah. And I’ve been with guys that were in the Marines afterwards and they think they’re still Marines. One guy, Rudy, he just died a couple years ago, I worked with him at [unclear]. He was another mechanic and he carried his dog tags and all kinds of stuff still from the Marines, and he was very proud of being a gunner on a helicopter and shooting everybody. One of the kids, white kids there at work, asked him, “Well, how could you tell who to shoot or who not to shoot from up in the air?” He said, “You don’t care. You shoot everybody.” I mean, that’s the way it was. And so, yeah, they think a lot different than we do as a sailor.

We’d go on shore—well, I’ll tell you one incident in particular, okay? We were off the coast of Vietnam, and this is where I really started to change. We’re off the coast of Vietnam and there’s a village. You could see it on the beach, but there’s a village and there’s fishing boats, and we’re waving to them and they’re waving to us, you know. And then all of a sudden, I’m not sure if this was the mission where they were going to land Marines and the South Vietnam Army was on the south side of the village. I can’t remember if this was that particular mission, but what I remember is that they sounded general quarters. I had different places I went during general quarters. Sometimes I’d be at the emergency diesel. This time I was at the magazine, and our job was to take powder from the magazine, take it up, do like a bucket brigade up to the gun mount, because in the gun mount they had all the shells, but they didn’t have the powder, and the powder would send it up. It came, like, in canisters. So we’d send the canisters up from three decks below up to the gun mount. And we’re just firing and firing, and what they were firing was white phosphorous shells. White phosphorous shells will explode over the village and when they explode, white phosphorous, when it hits the atmosphere, it becomes a ball of fire. So that village was being burned up. [cries] [recorder turned off]





ESPINO:

Ready?



00:08:46

BECERRA:

Yeah. So we couldn’t see what was going on. We just knew we were firing shell after shell because we’re below decks. So when there’s a break in the firing, the gunner’s mate comes down from the gun mount and he’s a lifer, and he’s an E5, a second-class gunner’s mate, but he’s stupid, you know, but we asked him, “What’s going on out there? What are we doing?” And he says, “Ah, it’s fuckin’ great, man. Everything’s burning. The whole village is burning. Everybody’s running around, their hair’s on fire, their head’s on fire. Everything’s running around on fire.” So we said, “What?” What the fuck?” And so everybody that’s passing powder up stops. A guy had come down to make us hurry up and pass the powder up faster, and when he told us that, that all these people are being burnt alive, everybody just freezes, you know. Everybody just freezes.

We can’t believe what we’re hearing, you know, and everybody just stares at him. And then he looks at everybody just staring at him. Everybody just froze, and so he starts yelling, “Get that fucking powder up there!” So we start passing it up again, but everybody’s in shock, you know, “What the fuck?” And after the fire mission is over, we go up on the deck and we can see the village is just ashes and smoke coming up. So then we go sit on the decks and, you know, guys are bummed out. So I’m sitting down with some other sailors, and the gunner’s mate walks by and so I look at him, “Hey, motherfucker, what are you going to do now? You going to go find someplace to jack off now?” And he got all embarrassed, you know. The other guys wanted to say the same thing to him, you know, and then he just left because he knew we weren’t like him. We were not like him at all.

But the thing about it is that even though we were doing something wrong and we realized what we were doing was wrong, we still kept doing it. We still kept passing the powder up there. And everybody didn’t like it, everybody knew it was wrong, we kept passing powder up to that gun mount, and that bothers you. I mean, you’re nineteen, twenty years old, and you’re in a military environment where you follow orders no matter what. And that’s why sometimes I think about the Germans, you know, that it wasn’t just the SS that killed Jews; it was all the army. Everybody would just go out on killing missions and just line up Jews and shoot them down, and you did not have to be in the SS. You could just be a normal regular soldier who had been drafted into the army and you find yourself doing the same thing.





ESPINO:

So there was like, a culture of obedience?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes. And also you think about what happens during a revolution, because I talked to you the last time about the Mexican Revolution, how prisoners were not taken prisoners; they were shot, they were executed. Today, of course, all the liberals would be demanding action, you’ve got to catch guys like Pancho Villa just like you did Milosevic and put him on trial for war crimes for killing all those prisoners, but that’s the way liberals are. It wouldn’t matter what the people were going through, the suffering of the people. What would drive these Indians to revolt in Mexico? Because besides being a social revolution, it was also a Native revolt. I see the pictures of those soldiers where they were Indians. And I think about them when people, like, right now, will the government take your guns away? I say, yes, they will. And will American soldiers turn on the American people? Yes, they will, just like Tiananmen Square. Chinese soldiers turned on Chinese students and fired those weapons, yes. Human beings are capable of doing that because we did it. We did it, and the guys on the ground did the same fucking thing. My Lai, there was thousands of My Lais. You know, it wasn’t just one.





ESPINO:

But they hadn’t prepared you that you would do some killing, that you would be involved in killing?



00:12:09

BECERRA:

Yes, we did. They did, but, see, this is the only time we actually got to see what we were doing. The rest of the time we would fire over the hills. They would tell us, “There’s enemy positions over there you’re going to bomb.” We didn’t know what the hell—we’re just [unclear] enemy positions, so we fired. One time they would say there’s—the spotter plane would be flying. Okay, if you tell us how far away the enemy was, there’s twenty Viet Congs over here, so they tell us to fire. So we fired three rounds. The first one, too far though, next one, too short, so we get a bearing of how to fire the next one. But this time on the first round of fire, all twenty of the Vietnamese—he said, “They’re Viet Congs.” He doesn’t know who they are, we don’t know who they are, but we just assume because they told us, and so you kill twenty people.

So, yeah, and on the side of our ship we had for how many confirmed killings we had, there were stripes on the side of the ship and also for the planes shot down because we were a radar picket destroyer. So we would spot the Vietnamese MiGs coming toward us, and then they would be intercepted from the carriers and shot down. So those planes were kills and they were on the side of our ship.





ESPINO:

So meaning that was a symbol of pride?



00:14:07

BECERRA:

Yeah. The kills were, yes. I worked with some guys who—one of the guys that I work with in the union, he’s a Chicano and he was on a patrol, for example. He was in the army. He was on patrol. He was on a tank when they were ambushed. There was an explosion. Everybody had got killed except three guys. He was one of the guys that didn’t get killed, but he was all shot up. But before that happened, he was a young sergeant and before that happened, he says, “I had forty-nine ears.” That means forty-nine Vietnamese that he killed. He cut off their ears and he wore their ears, “I had forty-nine ears.” They used to call it those ears. I mean, that is the degree that not only is the enemy dehumanized, but also you are dehumanized. That’s what it turns you into. I was lucky I was not in that situation. Then also times changed. Later, as the soldiers were going in, they were going in drafted and they hated the war and they refused to go fight. In fact, that’s when fr_____ takes place, you know, you kill the officer in charge, the platoon leader. He wants to lead you into combat. No, you’re not going to go and get killed.

But at the time this man was in, everybody was still gung-ho. For us on the ship, after that incident, that’s when we destroyed that village, we went into port and we would talk to sailors who were on other destroyers, and they would tell us that they had blown up a hospital. They said, “But the old man marked it down ‘destroyed a white building,’” but it was a hospital. So I thought, “Jesus Christ, what are we doing?” So that’s when I started reading. That’s why I told you I read and came to the conclusion that, no, that’s not what I believe. I wasn’t raised that way.





ESPINO:

But how would they prepare you for something like that?





BECERRA:

They don’t.





ESPINO:

They don’t prepare you to hate the enemy? They don’t give you an ideology about communism, about threat to U.S. security and those kinds of things where you feel like you were defending something? You’re defending something against something.



00:16:18

BECERRA:

Yes. Remember, at that time I was going to grade school in the fifties when you had drills in case there’s an atomic attack, get underneath your desk, those kinds of things. So, yeah, from childhood, we were prepared for this anti-Communist thing, right? And, yeah, it was always a part of the ideology of growing up in the fifties under the Eisenhower administration, and then later under Kennedy. I mean, Kennedy almost got everybody killed during the Cuban Missile Crisis, right? He almost killed the whole world, but this is how strong that ideology was. And that was, like, in ’62 and I went in in ’63. So, yeah, we were very much—the military didn’t have to brainwash us. The political climate was such that you went in to contain communism, right? And then when you find out that you’re not containing anybody, you’re just killing people, campesinos, you know, Vietnamese campesinos, “No, this is fucked up.” That’s not the way you’re raised.

Obviously not everybody is going to start looking at what you’re doing, examining it, analyzing it, you know, but I was raised that way. My father raised me like that, you know, think and be critical. And so when I’m in that situation, yeah, fuck yeah, I’m going to start thinking, “This is fucked up. I wasn’t raised this way, you know.” That’s when I started thinking, I’m thinking but not everybody’s like that. Not everybody’s going to be the same way. Some people are going to come back proud, you know, and they’re going to go to join the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and other guys will just want to forget. Like some guys will go live up in the mountains of northern New Mexico because they messed up and they can’t go back and live in society, Chicanos.





ESPINO:

Drugs or alcohol.





BECERRA:

Yeah, yeah. So everybody reacts different ways. I just got pissed. I got really pissed, you know, because I felt betrayed, really betrayed.





ESPINO:

By who?





BECERRA:

First, by the government, by the military. Because I told you before about what my experiences are in religion. The church, the churches, the government, the military, the upbringing that I had, you know, in the schools that prepared me for something else, and I was bitter and pissed, you know. So that’s the way I came back: pissed.





ESPINO:

You were already pissed when you left. Then you got more pissed.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

So was that the first time that you really felt what you were doing was wrong, was that one Vietnamese experience?





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

And then after that, did you have more of those? Did you have to go through more of that?





BECERRA:

Yeah, but we didn’t see it. We weren’t going to see it anymore.





ESPINO:

It was a one-time—





BECERRA:

Just that one time we saw it, yeah. Yeah, the one time we saw it and the rest of the time we didn’t see it. We’d just be told there’s a target, blow it up. We’d blow it up and we didn’t have to see it. But, no, when I came back, I was pissed.





ESPINO:

You mentioned—I don’t know if we recorded it; I don’t think we did—that you started reading. You started absorbing a lot of different ideas.



00:19:1900:20:47

BECERRA:

Yeah. When this happened, after I saw that everybody else was doing it, too, the other ships were doing the same thing we were doing, and then all these things started to accumulate, that they were going to send us on provocative missions to provoke the Vietnamese to attack us and all that, I went back to the commissary, the store on the base, and got those books that I told you about. I started reading books on the black Civil Rights Movement and on the black liberation—not just the black liberation story here, but in the third world, what was then going to be called the third world. It wasn’t called the third world yet, and the struggle against colonialism.

And I started reading about M_____ in Algeria and Lumumba in Africa, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel, and other leaders in the struggle against colonialism, and then reading about and being introduced to terms like neocolonialism. What is neocolonialism? What does independence really mean? And I would read those and then I would read the struggle of African Americans and I came to the conclusion it was the same struggle against the same people. I mean, I was a sailor, but I could see it. What I was reading, it was the same thing, and I didn’t need anybody to tell me that. I could see what was happening, the same struggle. And then because of Cuba, I could identify so strongly with those struggles because of Fidel and Che. Even though I was not a left-wing politically, even though I had been raised conservative, I still loved Fidel and Che because I thought they were right. They were revolutionaries and they were right. So whatever these struggles, people in other countries, I identified with them immediately and with the struggle of African Americans, and so that’s when I started thinking and thinking about what’s going on.

Also when I was at sea, I had a radio and I would get shortwave from China, from the People’s Republic of China, and that’s the first time that I heard about the invasion of Santo Domingo, where Johnson sent the Marines into Santo Domingo. And I told one of the sailors from South Carolina—I swear to God, the southerners are so fuckin’ stupid. I told him what I had just heard on the radio, that the U.S. had invaded Santo Domingo. He said, “Where did you hear that?” “On the radio from the PRC, from Red China.” “You’re going to believe that shit? That’s a Red China’s [unclear].” They’re not going to lie to the world about something like this. The whole world can—.” “Nah, it’s a fucking [unclear].” “Jesus Christ.” And, of course, then afterwards, I read Time magazine and Newsweek magazines where they talk about it, and they were interviewing the president who had been elected, and how they were pissed. They were pissed. They said, “Well, this is like the elephant that’s afraid of the mouse,” the U.S. reaction to the election in Santo Domingo or the Dominican Republic. And so those kinds of things, you know, were going through my head, “What the hell’s going on?” And that’s when I became a Socialist, as a result of that.





ESPINO:

How did you maintain that while serving for the U.S.? Did you have to hide it? Were you just waiting out your time? Did you want to defect?



00:24:05

BECERRA:

It happened, like, during the last six months I was on active duty. I think that’s about when it happened. Remember, we’re not in combat all the time. Most of the time, we’re on patrol. It’s boring. We’re just a radar picket ship, right, and there were some times you’d go into combat. At least once a month we’d be in combat, okay, at least once a month, but most of the time we were on patrol. Our role as a radar picket ship was to keep tabs on the North Vietnamese MiGs and to defend the aircraft carriers that were bombing both the North and South. So if any MiGs came towards the aircraft carriers, we had to warn the aircraft carrier, or any torpedoes, any subs, anything. We’re there to warn them, but then we would be relieved on patrol and go back to Japan. But during those missions, we would go on combat missions and that’s when these things would take place.

So most of the time I was not doing that. Most of the time I didn’t have to even think about it, and that gave me time to read and to think and that was it, you know, that was it. It wasn’t till I came back, and then there were things that would happen. I come back, and Muhammad Ali has become the champion, and my brother’s all pissed off, “Goddamn it, Cassius Clay’s got a big mouth.” Well, yeah, Cassius Clay had a big mouth, of course, you know? And so I tell my brother, “But that’s good. That’s good. Somebody’s got to speak up like that, Ruben. Somebody’s got to speak up like that for black people. He’s not supposed to be humble and quiet.”

So then my brother started thinking about it. My brother was the same way and so he starts thinking about it and then he became, like, very left-wing, very critical of the government, and my whole family, my whole family, my brothers and sisters. But I saw Muhammad Ali and the stands that he took. So then I enrolled at Compton College, and the first thing I wanted to do is go to the library and get a book on Karl Marx. So I don’t know anything about communism, so I go get Das Kapital and, you know, like I said, I read the first page and I said, “That’s it. Forget it.”





ESPINO:

It’s pretty dense reading to read alone. In a class, maybe.





BECERRA:

Today you can go on the Internet and there’s classes on Kapital on the Internet. You’ve got an instructor that will take you through it, but in those days, you know, we didn’t have the Internet. So either you have a class, have somebody leading you, or forget it.





ESPINO:

Were you afraid, though, to be seen with a book like that? Did you hide it? Did you cover the book cover so nobody could see what you were reading, or was it something that you felt safe doing in public?





BECERRA:

[laughs] Okay. I got out in ’66, and then a year later I’m working—I got out in July of ’66. I got discharged. A year later I’m working at Douglas Aircraft on the line, right? I had been working on the military work and then I went over to the commercial side. Most of the work I did was commercial. But I was pissed, and this is 1967, and so I grow my beard, I’ve got my jacket on, on the back in [unclear] it says “Viva la revolución,” right? [laughs] I went to work with that in that place where you’re supposed to have a security clearance to work, right? I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I was still so pissed, I didn’t care. No, it didn’t bother me at all.





ESPINO:

Did you know what you were building at Douglas Aircraft?





BECERRA:

Yeah, the military part was on the Phantom, the F-4 Phantom, which is [unclear] still used today. They just upgraded it, and this is, like, a forty-year-old plane. But I was on the F-4 Phantom and the T-38 trainer. Those are two planes. And the Phantom was being used in Vietnam. The single most-used plane in Vietnam was the phantom.





ESPINO:

I’m assuming you developed an anti-Vietnam War position.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

When did you develop that? Was it while you were—





BECERRA:

While I was in the service.





ESPINO:

But you came back and you were working in a place where you were actually building bombs.



00:28:26

BECERRA:

Yes. To me it was two different things. I didn’t know at the time that that’s exactly—the Communist position is that it’s two different things. Because wherever I went, I wasn’t going to shut my mouth about what we were doing, okay? I mean, I’ve worked on F-18s afterwards, the navy F-18s, and I’ve never cared. I mean, I’m working, look, at Northrop in the eighties, at Northrop in the eighties I worked on the F-18s. I was a toolmaker, not an assembler, but as a toolmaker. There were guys working on those planes rolling their toolboxes and they got KPFK stickers on their toolboxes [unclear]. I mean, this is your job, this is what you do, okay? And then sometimes the guys would get pissed off and they would sabotage these planes. And then [unclear] would come in, they’d be all pissed off. But that’s the way it is.

So, no, I had no problem working on the F-4 Phantom, the T-38 trainer or the commercial, because I worked on the DC-8 and the DC-9, yeah, DC-8 and DC-9, yeah. DC-10 would come out later after I quit Douglas.





ESPINO:

So when you returned home, you immediately were able to get a position?





BECERRA:

No, I had bum jobs that I hated, both union and nonunion, because I didn’t have a way to get into a skilled job immediately. So the only experience I had was an electrician, so I applied as an electrical sub-assembly at Douglas and I got in, both because I was a veteran and I had—they want to know if you can work with your hands, you know, the dexterity and all that, and I did, so I got in there.





ESPINO:

Did they give you a test?





BECERRA:

Yes, you get tested quite a bit. You have to have the dexterity, the manual dexterity to work there in sub-assembly, and, yeah, I had it. I had it from high school when the type of work that I had done, part-time work that I had done while I was in high school, that developed my dexterity a lot. It was packing and unpacking eggs, dairy products, but the eggs primarily. And so that teacher [unclear] fast, everything fast, “And don’t break those eggshells as you’re handling them,” right?





ESPINO:

Just being careful.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Fast and careful.





BECERRA:

Yeah. So I was trained for that.





ESPINO:

So in 1966, that’s when you moved back to—





BECERRA:

Compton. When I came out of the navy, I went back to live in Compton.





ESPINO:

And that’s where your parents were?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And you stayed with them?





BECERRA:

I stayed with them for about a year and then moved out.





ESPINO:

Why did you move out?





BECERRA:

Stupid. Because you think that you’re already a man, you shouldn’t be at home, and the girls wanted to be with guys that have their own apartment, and I buy into that. In ’66, I buy a ’66 Impala, right, because now, you know, I’m a veteran. This is what I should be doing. And you’re young and stupid, you know. I should have stayed with my parents longer. Just a lot of things I could have done while I was living with them, which I didn’t do. But that’s what I did.





ESPINO:

Like what? What could you—





BECERRA:

I could have helped them just pay off the house faster, okay, and then at the same time, I could have, for my own future, I could have started buying property at the time. Because later on in the eighties I would be buying a lot of real estate, but then in the nineties I would lose it all. But I could have bought property then, you know, and things that you have to do to be able to have a certain amount of freedom to do things that you really want to do and not be stuck in the factory all the time.





ESPINO:

So you were making good money then?





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Did you regret having joined the navy or did you think that—





BECERRA:

No. No, even today, even today I don’t. If I hadn’t joined the navy, I would not have had the experiences that I had. I would not have the understanding that I have. I would not have traveled. I mean, you have to get away. You have to get away from the barrio or the ghetto, wherever. You’ve got to get away, you know, so you can start back and reflect, and the only way to get out was the navy. There was no other way. And the fact that there was a war going on, I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I mean, these are things that happen in life. You can’t go back and rewrite it and you’ve got to go back and learn from it. And, no, I’m not sorry that I joined the navy. I enjoyed [unclear].





ESPINO:

When you came back, you said that you joined the Young—





BECERRA:

Chicanos.





ESPINO:

It wasn’t Citizens?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

How did you hear about that group? Because this was in 1967, so the year after your return.



00:34:1000:35:19

BECERRA:

Yeah. I was driving through East L.A. These are things you remember forever, right? My cousin and I had gone to see some girls that lived in Ramona Gardens in Hazard, right? Come back, we go to a hotdog stand to get something to eat, and at the counter there’s a magazine there, just a four-page, like, paper, and so they call it a magazine, but it’s not really a magazine. It’s just four pages. I pick it up and I start reading it. It’s La Raza magazine, right? So I start reading it. And this was maybe in September or October of ’67, a year later. And so I start reading it and I read it and I react like my daughter did when she read that book on Killing the Black Body. I read it. I said, “What the fuck? I’m not crazy. I’m not the only one who thinks this way.” So I read it. “Son of a bitch,” you know. And so there was a phone number, so I called up La Raza, and the guy that answers the phone was Chicho Jiménez, Narciso Jiménez, and he was a steelworker. I think he was out of 2058, Local 2058, I think. He answers the phone and I told him that I saw the magazine. I wanted to get involved, go help put out the paper and stuff, and he says, “Tell you what. You should go down to the—.” First he asked me what I do. I told him, “I’m [unclear].” “Oh, you’re in the Autoworkers?” “Yeah, I’m in UAW.”

He says, “Hey, we need you there, man. We need more Chicanos in the unions.” I said, “Yeah, but, you know, what I want to do isn’t the union [unclear] local. I want to get involved with—.” I didn’t know there was Chicano Movement at the time. I just thought there was this magazine. And this is ’67, so the movement hasn’t really exploded yet. So he told me to go to the Piranya Coffeehouse. He said, “There’s young Chicanos like you who think like you.” To me, a coffeehouse meant beatniks, right, and jazz. I said, “Wait a minute. Fucking beatniks. I don’t want to go to a coffeehouse with a bunch of beatniks.” “No, no, no, no, no. They’re young Chicanos like you.” So then I go to the Piranya Coffeehouse with my cousins, the same ones, and I start talking to the people there. I think, “Goddamn it, these people think like I do,” and they’re involved in different issues in the community, different political issues and social issues, and they’re involved with UMAS and MASA, the student organizations at the time.

And so what happens, you know, I want to go to some of the demonstrations and get involved, but I can’t because I’m working day shift at Douglas, so I asked for a change to go on swing shift. I go on swing shift, so on the day shift I can be active in the community. Well, in a way that’s what got me arrested because then I’m involved in the walkouts. If I’d stayed working day shift, I would have [unclear] at nighttime, right? I would never have gotten busted, right, but I go on day shift and I got swept into that. But, yeah, that’s what got me involved was la revista. Years later I would tell Risco, and he was very proud, you know, that that’s how I’d gotten involved, because Risco was [unclear] that struggle, right? But that’s how I got involved with the Young Chicanos for Community. So I talked to David Sanchez. He said, “We changed the name to Young Chicanos.” At that time, Vicki Castro was not there anymore. Moctesuma was not there anymore because he went to school. Moctesuma Esparza was involved; I just did not see him because I was working swing shift and he was going to school and after school he’d be involved in organizing the walkouts and stuff.





ESPINO:

He had an opposite schedule to you.





BECERRA:

Yeah, we had opposite schedules, and with a lot of people it was like that. That’s why these people say, “Remember we used to hand out at the coffeehouse?” I wasn’t there. I was working, and that’s why I missed a lot of people who were at the coffeehouse during that period.





ESPINO:

In the night.





BECERRA:

In the night, yes.





ESPINO:

So do you remember who was there at the first—well, let me back up, because you said that he told you we needed people in the unions, we needed Chicanos in the unions. And you said—





BECERRA:

I said no. I said, no, I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t interested. I wanted to know—I read the magazine. Where I was doing that, that’s what I wanted to do, okay, and I did not want to do that in the local, and I think I was right. That was the right decision to make.





ESPINO:

Do you remember specifically what issues drew your attention?





BECERRA:

No, I don’t. No, I don’t.





ESPINO:

Have you seen that same magazine?





BECERRA:

Probably. I’m sure there were things there that had to do with police brutality and with Reddin. Reddin was the police chief then. But I can’t remember all the stuff.





ESPINO:

Be interesting to see what was in that issue that—I don’t have any. I have one, but it’s from 1977, so it’s ten years later. But they do have it in the library, which is nice, if you’re interested in ever checking those out. So then you go to the La Piranya and you do meet David Sanchez.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

What was your impression of him back then? Not today, but back—yeah. [laughs]





BECERRA:

I thought Dave was cool, “David, you’re raising the right issues, David.” Ralph Ramirez was there. I think Fred might have been there by then. Carlos Montes wasn’t there right away in ’67, but he was certainly there in ’68, by January, February, you know. But the thing, too, is that I would not see Carlos, because Carlos was there at night, and I didn’t see Carlos again in the daytime until the walkouts. He was there, but I was on a different shift. But I remember Johnny Parsons was there, and Johnny Parsons became like a mythical symbol in the Berets and in the movement.





ESPINO:

Johnny Parsons?





BECERRA:

Johnny Parsons, yeah. His name was Manuel Alva, but he used the name Johnny Parsons. His father was a Mexican lawyer who had been a part of the administration of the president who tried to start the initiative to modernize Mexico, Aleman, Miguel Alemán. Miguel Alemán is really criticized real heavily in the movie La Ley de Herodes.





ESPINO:

I’ve never seen it.





BECERRA:

Oh, you’ve got to see it.





ESPINO:

It’s a history film about Mexico?



00:40:2400:42:16

BECERRA:

Yeah, it’s a film about La Priista at the time of this push to modernize Mexico in the fifties, early fifties, and it’s called La Ley de Herodes. And when you see it, you understand. You know el Rey Herod was Herodes

Remember when King Herod is king of the Jews, right, and the wise men come to tell him that the king of the Jews has just been born, and he says, “Oh, well, tell me where he is so that I might go and worship him.” And he wants to kill him so they don’t go back and tell the king, right? That’s the story, right? So then the king says, “Well, hell. Then I’m going to have to kill every little guy that’s under two years old.” So King Herod goes and kills all the children under two years old. So in other words, before you kill me, I’m going to kill you. I’m going to get mine before you—I’m going to wipe you out so I can get mine, right? That’s La Ley de Herodes and the movie’s [unclear]. Well, Miguel Alemán was the one who starts to push to modernize Mexico. He’s not a character, but he’s like a topic in that movie.

But anyway, Johnny Parsons’ dad was a Mexican lawyer. His mom was Jewish, but I can’t remember if she was Jewish from the U.S. or Jewish from Mexico, but she lived here and I met her, a really, really nice lady. So Johnny Parsons is important because Johnny Parsons is a guy who came up with the idea of wearing a brown beret, and he would explain to us the importance of it. So when somebody would think that we did it because the Panthers had berets and that influenced us, but that wasn’t the reason. The people in MASC, the Mexican American Student Confederation, they wore black berets, and we had seen them in December of ’67 at the statewide conference of UMAS and Chicano Student Organizations, and that influenced us as well.

But Johnny says, “We have to have a brown beret because we’re brown people. We represent a brown continent.” And he says, “And it’s important because it’s a symbol of urban guerilla warfare. This is what the Europeans used against the Germans.” You know, when you see pictures of the underground in France and stuff, they all wore berets. He says, “That becomes a symbol of guerilla warfare against the occupiers of our land.” He says, “That’s why we have to have it, as a symbol of a struggle against the occupation of our land.” And then he had the symbol for it, the crossed rifles, and then he put the cross. I said, “Johnny, why do we have to have a fucking cross, Johnny?” I didn’t want to have a cross. He says, “No, because our people are Catholic.” “Doesn’t give a fuck, man. We don’t need a cross. All right, fuck it. We’ll have a cross on there.” And so it has a cross and the rifles, right? I mean, I’ve got to wear the name Cruz right [unclear] the beret, right? Anyways, so that goes on there and that becomes a symbol. And so then, you know, the berets, all the grief [unclear] that’s what we’re going to have. That’s going to be our symbols, that’s our causa, and Johnny’s the one who came up with the idea.





ESPINO:

You were there? You witnessed him making these statements?





BECERRA:

Yeah, we talked about it, not just me. Tacos was there. David Torres [phonetic], he was there. Everybody saw that. Yeah, we all saw that.





ESPINO:

I’m going to go back and look at my—because I write the names of the individuals that are mentioned in my interviews for the people who are transcribing so that I give correct spelling. I don’t remember hearing his name.





BECERRA:

Who? Johnny?





ESPINO:

Yeah, I’ve interviewed David Sanchez and Gloria A_____ and Carlos Montes.





BECERRA:

Yeah. You’re not going to hear the name. Nuh-uh.





ESPINO:

What happened to him?



00:46:3700:47:59

BECERRA:

He went back to Mexico and later went to San Diego. You can go to San Diego and ask anybody who’s Johnny—his name was Manuel Alva. That’s one of the reasons why people say, “Here was Johnny Parsons.” In San Diego he was known as Manuel Alva. In San Diego he established, like, a new life, and the people down there know him, okay? Johnny was—whew. Johnny was almost like an ideological leader for the Berets. He’s the one that gave us, like, how to think about—first, to think of ourselves not just as Chicanos, but as part of a brown continent, and not just to think about Aztlán, even though at the time we didn’t talk about Aztlán till afterwards, but to think about ourselves as fighting not just for the Southwest, but for the whole continent, that it was a brown continent and that we were brown people and to look at things that way.

He’s the one that told us the importance of having the symbol as the Brown Berets. He’s the one that taught us that we had to make a break with the Mexican Americans, and the only way to make that radical break was to have radical symbols and radical rhetoric that would isolate them and would cause a split among the Mexican American community. They had to be put in a situation where they had to take a position either with the movement or against it, and if you’re against the movement, you’re with the whites, you’re with the Vendido. That’s where the Vendidos come out and the Tío Tacos comes out, because we started to really push and push that issue, who are the Tendidos, who are Tío Tacos, who’s going to side with the Chicanos, who is going to call themselves a Mexican American, who is going to call himself a Chicano, who’s going to cause that split, that polarization. And he explained to us how important that was, that we had to push it hard, which we did, to the extent of going to jail.

Everything we had to do had to push, because that ideological push that we had to do, and the thing is that the time was right for it. By the time the walkouts came, shit, after that, there was no stopping it. But we had to make that split and Johnny Parsons was the ideological leader of all of us, and that’s the line that he pushed. That line did not come from anybody else except Johnny Parsons, not David, not Ralph, not anybody except Johnny Parsons. The thing about Johnny is that he was just as militant, and when he talked, that’s just as militant as he was, actions that he took, things that he did. So people had a lot of respect for him, a lot of respect. And, yeah, people will forget him or they didn’t see him, okay? The people that forget him, porque no les conviene, remember to remember him, okay, and people that won’t mention him, they weren’t there when these decisions were being made.

Like, there’s an argument, who were the original Brown Berets. Okay, that’s how you find out too. Ask him who was Johnny Parsons, and the people that know who Johnny Parsons was, those are the original Brown Berets because they know him.





ESPINO:

Was he part of the Young Citizens? Young Chicanos, or did he come—





BECERRA:

Yes, he was there. Young Chicano for Community Action. He was there at the Piranya Coffeehouse. Now, I don’t think he was part of Young Citizens for Community Action.





ESPINO:

Okay. There were no women at this time, in those early days?





BECERRA:

Yes, there were. My sister, okay, my sister was there. Lizzy was there. Diane Robertson was there, but Diane Robertson had a problem, in that David Sanchez was anti-Communist. And Diane Robertson, because she hung out with the Panthers, was very much a Maoist, okay, and so she would come and talk to us. And, you know, there were elements in the Brown Berets who would, like, try to isolate her based on her ideology.





ESPINO:

Not because she’s white? I’m assuming she’s white by her name.





BECERRA:

Yeah, she’s white, but, you know, it depends on how you’re going to say that, okay? She’s Portuguese, I think, and her family owns—on [unclear] Street, you know when you drive by at the corner of Alameda and Sunset, you see Celito Lindo, the taco stand? Okay, her family owns that. She’s my age. So she’s one of the owners of that, okay, so I see her, like, separate from the community. She’s part of our community. She’s one of us, okay?





ESPINO:

Culturally.





BECERRA:

Yeah, culturally she’s one of us, okay? And as far as racially, it doesn’t matter because we’re everything. We’re black, we’re everything. But she’s one of us.





ESPINO:

Well, let me just clarify. I asked that because the Brown Berets were nationalistic.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And if you look at the Chicano Movement, some factions of the movement, like, for example, Corky Gonzales, very nationalistic, not allowing whites to—they don’t want whites to be in the leadership. They don’t really want whites to be a part of it because they want self-determination of the Mexican American people. That’s why I asked that, because in some of the rhetoric in La Causa, it’s very anti-white, anti-Anglo. The Anglo is almost likened to the devil. So that’s why I—



00:51:16

BECERRA:

No, I don’t think it was that because, first of all, there’s always going to be white girls there anyway, right? Well, there were. This is 1967, ’68, okay, and the white girls are going to come, right? No, that wasn’t the reason for Diane being [unclear]. Because of her ideology.

So, yeah, there were women there, okay, but if you were a Communist, there was a real strong anti-Communist thing. I wasn’t a part of that anti-Communist thing. I didn’t have a problem with their Red Books. Some of the people did. And she would pass out the Red Books and then there was a bonfire. Somebody got the Red Books and started a fire with the Red Books, which pissed me off, but I wasn’t there when it happened, because I don’t believe in that. You don’t burn books, you know. But, yeah, there were women there, but like I said, I changed shifts. Like in February I changed shifts. And these were important early days, too, February of ’68. The walkouts happened in March. So I stopped seeing who was there at night.





ESPINO:

Well, okay. So you mentioned Johnny Parsons, who at the time also was—is Manuel Alva his real name?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

That’s his name in San Diego?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Manuel Alva is his name by birth?





BECERRA:

His real name, yes.





ESPINO:

By baptism or whatever. And the way you describe it, it sounds like there was a unity of thought based on his ideas. Is that correct?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And then you’re talking about the anti-communism. So where did Johnny Parsons—what was his position on that? I mean, if he was like the ideological leader, how did it become David—





BECERRA:

Oh, he left.





ESPINO:

—directing the anti-Communist position?





BECERRA:

Okay. First of all, if I didn’t want to be anti-Communist [unclear] people, we would just laugh because we’re not a Communist organization. So if you want to hate communism, hate communism all you want. We don’t care. We have an agenda, which was a democratic agenda, democratic in nature, about dealing with issues of school representation, all kinds of issues, anti-discriminatory. And so we weren’t fighting for socialism. So if you want to be anti-Communist, that’s your business. We don’t care. We’ve got an agenda. That’s what we’re fighting for. There’s a program. That’s it. So we didn’t care.





ESPINO:

Well, what about the Little Brown Book? Where does that come into play?





BECERRA:

Never heard of it.





ESPINO:

You never heard of the Little Brown Book?





BECERRA:

Somebody mentioned it sometime, but I never—





ESPINO:

David’s Brown Book, the book that he wrote, the little manifesto he wrote when he was in jail.





BECERRA:

Jesus. Yeah, now I remember. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never read it. I’ve never had any interest in reading it.





ESPINO:

He never had the Brown Berets study it and memorize the policies? I don’t have it with me. I thought I brought it with me, but I think I might not have it. I’ll bring it next time. I have a photocopy of it. I don’t have the actual Brown Book. So that wasn’t, like, the doctrine that—





BECERRA:

Not in ’68. Not in 1968, no. It might have come in later, but not in 1968.





ESPINO:

So then what was your objective? You said you had a philosophical belief system and things that you wanted to accomplish as the Brown Berets. What would those be?



00:56:17

BECERRA:

The things that struck us right away was, one, was the issue of police brutality, okay. That was like a day-to-day thing. The other issue was that there was no representation anywhere, like on the Board of Supervisors, on the City Council. We had Nava on the school board. That was, like, our way of exception. And so the question of having representation, democratic—that was important. The question of schools, the quality of education, what we were being taught in school, the lack of respect for our history in the schools, those were issues. There were issues of jobs, and I think one of the things that stuck out really strong was the war. Initially, when the issue of the war came out, I was against the war. There were going to be elements who did not want to be a part of the Antiwar Movement. I remember David Sanchez saying that that was a white thing, that struggle against the Vietnam War was a white thing, right, and that was not our thing. Well, that’s okay because, I mean, I was for the war too. I changed my mind. Everybody grows, and it wouldn’t be long before he was opposed to the war.

Let me give an example. In February of 1968, the Congress of Mexican American Unity had their convention at Belvedere Junior High School, at the auditorium at Belvedere Junior High School, and it was to endorse— [interruption]





ESPINO:

Education. Okay, we’re back. You were telling me what the issues were, the important issues of the Brown Beret, and you left off with a description of the problems in the educational system that you saw. Those issues, were they based on your own personal experience or what you were getting from the community? How did you define—





BECERRA:

For me they were based on my experiences, and what I heard from the community really just verified what I had already seen in high school at the time, the alienation that I felt, and to a point of wanting to drop out. I only stuck it out because I figured I’m too close to graduating, might as well stay here, but those issues were real. The school was like a reflection of society as a whole, their attitude towards Chicanos. And so you’ve got all those issues that were being raised were the things that I had seen, so that’s what it was based on.





ESPINO:

What about the influence of the black Civil Rights Movement? Were you looking at what they were doing and thinking you had the same problems and you should address them? Did they have any influence on what the Brown Berets were going to tackle first?





BECERRA:

A lot and, in particular, the Black Panther Party. But the whole militant wing of the African American struggle influenced us a lot, a lot. For example, we would go to the dances at the Black—what’s it called? I was going to say Black Workers [unclear], but it’s not. It was the Black Congress Building on Florence and Broadway. There was a two-story building there, and they had the Black Congress Headquarters there. We’d go there. We went to the Free Huey Newton rally in 1968, and it was a tremendous experience. People present there, I mean, jeez, there was Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X. Let’s see. God, I can’t remember all of them, all the people that were there, but Reies Tijerina spoke, and people went crazy over Tijerina. When they were introducing him—remember, this was after Tierra Amarilla and the courthouse raid, okay, because that had happened in June and now six months later, seven months later, this is February, and the courthouse raid was front-page news.

It was, like, on the second page of a right-wing newspaper here, the Herald Examiner, so people were very much aware of Tierra Amarilla. This took place at the Sports Arena downtown, and when they introduced Reies, I remember the brother who introduced him said, “All you people out here, you’re talking about revolution. I’m about to introduce the man who is making revolution!” Everybody went crazy. And then Reies didn’t come out. His brother came out. They came from [unclear]. One of the two came out and said, “He’s not here yet.” But then afterwards Reies walks out and everybody went crazy. It was a great, great rally and it was to raise funds to free Huey Newton. So, no, we were influenced a lot, I mean a lot by the black liberation struggle. That would have a really, really deep effect on us all the way.





ESPINO:

It would be ideology or strategy or—





BECERRA:

I think those two things. One was an identity with that struggle, okay, identifying with that struggle, especially for me, from Compton, where I grew up. The other one was the message, you know, of racism is bullshit. We’re not going to put up with it. We’re going to fight it right down the line, the most militant tactics, by any means necessary. That was the second thing. So from the tactical issue, ideological issue, yeah, we were not just impressed but identified so strongly with it, and all of us did. I mean, even today, you talk to Ralph Ramirez. It was just like if it was yesterday. He still feels very strongly against it, attitude against racism, and I mean, he still doesn’t give an inch on it. [interruption]





ESPINO:

Anyway, we’re back and we were talking about the issues.





BECERRA:

We were talking about Ralph Ramirez and that his views are just as strong today as they were then.





ESPINO:

Right.





BECERRA:

He’s still a fighter, you know, his attitude is the same.





ESPINO:

Right, but also we were talking about—I asked you if the ideas of the Brown Berets came—oh, you were talking about the Black Panthers and how Ralph still gets angry when people are racist towards blacks or whoever.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

So when you were talking about the Free Huey Newton demonstration, did you feel at that time that you were part of a community of like-minded—like a revolutionary cadre or—





BECERRA:

Yes, at that point, definitely. I totally felt that way, and also I saw the black revolutionaries as definitely taking the leadership role. Yes, we had [unclear], true, and we had Corky and we were young. You know, we were like—yeah, we were very, very young and we were accepting them as our role models, you know, people to emulate, very much so.





ESPINO:

So did you have a critique of Martin Luther King and that kind of civil rights activism?





BECERRA:

Yes, we did, and it was an unfair one. It was very unfair. But you have to remember that we were young, and our criticism of Martin Luther King was just as shallow as anybody else’s, all the black militants, that Martin Luther King was a good man, but that his path was not the right path to bring about equality. That had to be a revolutionary path, that we had to answer violence with violence. There was no turning the other cheek. And our attitude towards Martin Luther King was not a positive one. Later we would grow out of that and realize what a great man he was.





ESPINO:

How much later?





BECERRA:

I can’t remember. I can’t remember how much later, but it would be later, yeah, years later. Not days later, years later.





ESPINO:

Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking, years later.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

So who in the Chicano community or Mexican American community would you liken to or did you liken to Martin Luther King? Because a lot of the history talks about how the Chicano Movement was in opposition to the generation of, like, the G.I. Forum and the LULAC people. Did you have a critique of the way older Mexican Americans conducted their civil rights activism, like Esteban Torres or Julian Nava, for example?



01:05:35

BECERRA:

Yeah, basically they were, like, at the mercy of the white liberals, and that was the first problem that we had, that even if they were elected, they were at the mercy of the white liberals. Today it’s different. Today they’re at the mercy of whoever has money: insurance companies, oil companies. [laughs] So, you know, only the master has changed, right? But we were pissed about that. We were pissed about their attitudes, their attitudes towards racism and towards militant action.

They were Vendidos, you know, and like I said, we had to make a turn away from those very traditional views. We criticized them as Vendidos and Tío Tacos, even though by any standard they were still progressives, okay, but to us they were Vendidos, given how everything was changing, given how young we were, given the times, but they were progressives. They just were not radical enough, and we had to light a fire under their ass to get them to change or at least to put on a show for us that they were changing. So, yeah, that was our attitude towards them, that they were [unclear], they were Vendidos.





ESPINO:

What does it mean to be a white liberal? Does it mean the same today as it did back then?





BECERRA:

It does to me.





ESPINO:

Well, I don’t know.





BECERRA:

Basically, that you can’t trust them.





ESPINO:

What kinds of things would they do or how would their ideology shape the Mexican Americans in power, like, for example, Edward Roybal or Julian Nava, who was surrounded by whites? I don’t even think they were all liberals, though.





BECERRA:

Are you talking about today or back then?





ESPINO:

Back then.





BECERRA:

Back then, basically, they would be afraid—first, they would be afraid to speak out, and we would have to put a lot of pressure on them. But remember, there were very, very few elected officials, if any, and those that were there tended to be more conservative because they had gotten in with the traditional way and so they would be afraid to offend either liberal Democrats, liberal Chicanos, and so they would be afraid to speak. They would isolate themselves, as far as they were concerned. They would not be able to work in Sacramento. They wouldn’t be able to do anything. I mean, you might as well call yourself a Communist. So they were very much affected by the white liberals.





ESPINO:

So you’re saying that they would be afraid to offend the white or anybody who didn’t have—who had—well, I guess the people in power. They would be afraid to offend the people in power, which would be the white people.



01:09:07

BECERRA:

Yes. Look, it’s just like today, okay? An issue comes up. President Obama orders the execution of an American, two Americans, one fifteen years old, one an adult. He orders their execution without a trial, without charges, without anything. [unclear] execute them. You would think there would be an outcry from the whole liberal community. Nada, okay? The Mexican liberals fall into line. There’s only so much they can do. They’re not going to criticize Obama. Okay, you have to turn to the Tea Party, the libertarians, to be outraged. The guy that goes on the Senate floor is Rand Paul to filibuster, to filibuster on the issue. Since when does any president have the right to order the execution of any American anywhere without charges, without a trial? And everybody else is falling into line as a liberal, okay?

That’s why I say I don’t trust liberals, okay? You don’t accept that, and that’s not counting what the intelligence community’s doing as far as eavesdropping, I mean totally ignoring the Fourth Amendment. Like, right now a hundred journalists, all their files confiscated by the government because they said there’s a security [unclear]. No Fourth Amendment Rights. Not just Fourth Amendment; it’s also First Amendment, freedom of the press, right? So it’s like the Bill of Rights doesn’t mean anything, and those were put there by revolutionaries who didn’t trust the government because they were revolutionaries and they would only accept the Constitution if later on those civil rights were going to be protected.

That’s why we have the Bill of Rights, because revolutionaries demanded them, or there would be no Constitution. And they’re like, you know, what are they worth and where are the liberals, right? And when you do see the liberals speak up on an issue, it’s on the Second Amendment, to abridge the Second Amendment, okay? Because I don’t believe in that gun-control stuff and I’ll tell you why whenever you want to ask me why. [laughs] But now when it comes to abridging the Second Amendment, yeah, some liberals will speak out. And they’re being abridged, like, flagrantly, the Fourth and the First, they shut their mouths, and you would think these people would be speaking out. So, no, the liberals have not changed. Liberals are the same.





ESPINO:

So what you’re saying is it’s really about their self-interest, not about an ideology that crosses all these different issues and borders and that kind of thing.





BECERRA:

No, they’re cowards. Self-interest, cowardly. [laughs]





ESPINO:

So when you were in the Brown Berets, what was your ideology? You said you had become a Socialist.





BECERRA:

Yes, I was a Socialist, [unclear] Socialist, and I remember David Tacos [phonetic] heard me talking to a group of Brown Berets and I told I was a Socialist. Okay.





ESPINO:

You were out-of-the-closet Socialist. You were out in the open.





BECERRA:

Yeah, I was out in the open. I was never hiding it. You know, when you have a program, you speak to the program. If somebody wants to know if I’m a Catholic or whatever, I’ll tell you, I’m a Catholic or I’m an atheist, whatever, right? So if it doesn’t come up, you know, I’m not there to propagate socialism. We have our agenda, our program. So when I said that, yeah, I was a Socialist, one of my friends in the Brown Berets, David—we’re very close—says, “Damn. I didn’t know you were a Socialist. I mean, you didn’t tell me. You never said so.” “Well, no, we never talk about it.” He says, “No, but that’s cool. Now I’ve got to find out what a Socialist is.” [laughs] But, no, I was a Socialist, but our program was a democratic program and that’s what I propagated, you know. Before that, I was Catholic or anything else, it wasn’t an issue until somebody brings it up, and, yeah, of course.





ESPINO:

Right, because the program wasn’t about changing the government; it was about changing the educational system or improving relations with the police department so that you wouldn’t experience the brutality.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

But it wasn’t a revolutionary program. Am I wrong? Was it a revolutionary program?





BECERRA:

No, the written program was not, okay? The practical program was. Yeah, the practical program was, but it was not written.





ESPINO:

Well, how would you define that practical program?





BECERRA:

Wow. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Do you need time to think about it?





BECERRA:

No, I know exactly what it was. I just don’t want to get anybody into trouble.





ESPINO:

Oh, okay. I don’t want you to get anybody in trouble either. I mean, you don’t have to name names or anything.



01:14:14

BECERRA:

Well, no, but it was public record, I mean, what happened at the Billboard, okay, and there would be other actions that would be taken, right, and the agitation, okay, the agitation around different issues was revolutionary, okay, and was being spoken—look, the walkouts were a violation of law, okay? We were not acquitted of those counts. The only thing the appellate court said was that our right to organize was violated, so those felonies had to be thrown out, because the only felonies we had on us were conspiracy.

Then the court said—I read the opinion. They said “Now, as far as the misdemeanor counts of disturbing the classes, all that other stuff that they did, the vandalism, all that stuff, nail them. Go after them, because they very clearly violated a law.” And the appellate court said, “Kill them, get them,” you know, come after us. So those actions, those were revolutionary actions, okay? They were a violation of law, flaunting the law, but they had to be done. Some of it was nonviolent civil disobedience and some of it was violent civil disobedience, depending on how you see violence, the destruction of property, those kinds of things. So, no, the practical program was revolutionary.





ESPINO:

I’m going to do a little bit more reading on that because that’s a really interesting comparison between revolutionary and violent and civil disobedience, because when you define the walkouts, there were many people involved in the walkouts who didn’t have a revolutionary ideology like you did.





BECERRA:

But you’re asking me about the Brown Berets.





ESPINO:

So I’m saying it’s like, and I think—maybe I’m wrong, but even some members of the Brown Berets did not have a revolutionary ideology. Or do you think that they all shared that same revolutionary ideology that you did, that you had?





BECERRA:

I don’t know. I know that the ones I hung out with did, and maybe it’s because when you speak a certain way and to a certain point to those issues, the people that share that point of view will gravitate towards you, okay? And if they’re put off by it, they’ll move away from you, so the people that would gravitate towards me would be people that shared those views. So I can’t answer your question.





ESPINO:

So the people in your circle all shared your views?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes.





ESPINO:

But you said you were very close to David Sanchez.





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

No, you weren’t? Who did you say you were close with?





BECERRA:

Johnny Parsons and David Torres.





ESPINO:

Oh, you said David, but it’s not David Sanchez.





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

Okay, so it’s David Torres.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Okay. So you didn’t see eye-to-eye with David Sanchez from the very beginning?





BECERRA:

No, I didn’t see eye-to-eye with David from the very beginning, but I respected him at the very beginning. I always respected him, even when I couldn’t make sense out of what he was saying. I figured, okay, you know. But at a certain point, I figured it was time to leave, and there was no way I was going to start factionalizing in the Brown Berets. I had too much respect for what we had done and the creation of the Brown Berets and the historical role, as far as I was concerned, of the Brown Berets. There’s no way you factionalize and destroy it. You leave. That’s what I did. But, no, not everybody was going to share those revolutionary ideas, no, but the people around me did.





ESPINO:

What about the symbol of the gun? Did you believe in an arms struggle? Was that something that—





BECERRA:

Yes, yes. It wasn’t symbolic. To me it wasn’t symbolic. It was real.





ESPINO:

It wasn’t self-defense? How would you—





BECERRA:

It was self-defense, but if whatever it would take, okay, at that time with the perspective I had at the time, whatever it would take to attain equality, whatever it would take to recover our land, whatever it would take, you know, and by any means necessary, that’s what the rifles meant.





ESPINO:

Is that the ideology that came down from Johnny Parsons, or was that your interpretation of that symbol?





BECERRA:

That was the influence of the militant wing of the African American liberation struggle. They influenced us a lot and we respected them, highly respected them, and that’s where the influence came from. Sure, we could point to icons from the Mexican Revolution, you know, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, all of that, surely that influenced us, but more immediately it would be the black liberation struggle.





ESPINO:

Yeah, because when you look at La Causa, you see a lot of—like, there’s one that celebrates the 16th of September. I guess it makes sense that you would just focus on—but it’s mostly Mexican and Chicano. You don’t see, like, where the African American struggle influenced you.





BECERRA:

You don’t?





ESPINO:

No.





BECERRA:

Watch. Right there, that’s the influence.





ESPINO:

What? The big gun? The big tank? What?





BECERRA:

No. All this. Everything that you see there, okay? The creation of the Brown Berets, okay, the struggles, the demonstrations, all that was influenced by the black liberation struggle.





ESPINO:

But was it something that the Brown Berets themselves wanted to be identified with? Did they want to be identified with the black liberation struggles?





BECERRA:

No, no.





ESPINO:

That’s my point [unclear].





BECERRA:

No, not at all. In fact, we wanted the movement to be seen as independent of the black liberation struggle, but in solidarity with the black liberation struggle, but totally independent. The attitude of self-determination hinged on that. The legitimacy of the Chicano Movement hinged on that, that it was independent, it was autonomous, the issues were legitimate, and so even though we were influenced and were in solidarity with the struggle of African Americans and we saw them as our brothers, I mean really ideological brothers and brothers in struggle, we’re still independent of them. So you’re not going to see that in there, okay, because that’s the real issue.





ESPINO:

But did they or did you feel like your issues were different, that your experience was different, or did you feel like it was the same struggle, well, in general the same struggle in general, just that you lived in East L.A. and they lived in, you know, in Oakland and South Central?



01:22:30

BECERRA:

No. We thought it was different, okay? First, there was the question of land, the question of annexation and inequality based on that annexation. All the issues that we had were based on an annexation of our land. So it had different roots. Same system, same enemy, but a different character to the issue of national oppression that was rooted in the annexation of the Southwest. Okay, sure, there was issues in education and jobs and war, of racism, but even the racism was different, okay, because the racism against us was not as brutal as the racism against African Americans. It was just totally brutal. So it was different because some Latinos or Chicanos could pass as whites. In Texas or in the South, Mexicans and whites could marry and there’d be no lynchings, where that couldn’t happen with African Americans.

So, no, the racism was not on the same level as with—and that in the violent sense, okay? It was in the same level if you talked about discrimination in jobs, although Chicanos still had an advantage over blacks, okay, but for us it doesn’t matter. You’re still not getting that job. You’re not getting that job. If you’re not getting that education, you’re still not getting it. So you’re not worried about the differences and how much. It’s still an issue, but underlying it all is that annexation. That annexation will not go away because, based on that, everything falls in, from the question of deportations, who has a right to be here, you know, that white supremacy is based on that attitude of justification of the annexation, all those issues. So, no, there were some differences on the causes of it, but fundamentally, of course there would be the same enemy for the same reason, the exploitation of our people.





ESPINO:

Well, will you talk about self-determination and autonomy, but you have this other movement that’s talking about the same thing, the end product, what does it look like? When you talk about Chicanos and the retaking of Aztlán, which was the ideology of some people during that period, how do you justify that to the African Americans? Like, what would their role be? The Asian American community and other peoples, how do they fit into that system?





BECERRA:

Okay. That was our maximum program, we would call it, okay, was the question of self-determination for the Southwest and for Chicanos in the Southwest primarily. Because it’s not just the Asians, it’s also Native Americans. For us the issue was first things first, okay, and when it becomes a practical issue, we’ll deal with the issue then. Right now this is our maximum program, what we’re fighting for, and that’s it. What happens afterwards—I mean, we can show the unity and struggle of African Americans and blacks and— [interruption]





ESPINO:

Okay, so what did you call it? The ultimate program?





BECERRA:

Maximum.





ESPINO:

Maximum program.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

And was that something that you discussed amongst yourselves or something you just instinctively knew?





BECERRA:

In the Brown Berets, you mean?





ESPINO:

Yeah.





BECERRA:

Yeah, we always talked about that. Yes, we always talked about that.





ESPINO:

So can you tell me a little bit about what the—or not tell me a little bit, but if you could describe a scene of you—would it be at La Piranya, or where would you have these conversations and what would it look like?





BECERRA:

We’d have the conversations everywhere. It could be what are we going to do, we would say, when we kick white people out, even though we didn’t believe in kicking white people out, but really what that meant was when we had control, self-determination, and we discussed that over and over again.





ESPINO:

Well, like in your cars, at someone’s house?





BECERRA:

Anywhere. Somebody’s house, in a car, on a picket line, anywhere. But, yeah, we would talk about that over and over again, that if we got rid of white rule, that things would be better, okay, that we had controls. Now, with time, you start realizing, even then, that that was only a part of the problem. Right now, for example, there’s some people wanting to incorporate East L.A. [unclear] heard anything from [unclear], from [unclear], from Compton, from—they still haven’t learned? Do you still want another one, another [unclear]? Jesus. And so it’s not, you know, an end in itself, okay?





ESPINO:

But at that time it was.





BECERRA:

Yeah, at the time it was, yes. We didn’t know any better, and so, yeah, at that time it was.





ESPINO:

Even with your—well, you said you were a Socialist. Can you define more what that meant? Did you have a class ideology? Because if you have a class ideology, it would seem that you wouldn’t be involved in a nationalist organization, that you would be in more of a leftist kind of organization versus one that just focused on one ethnic group gaining power.





BECERRA:

No. For example, Martin Luther King, when you read his speeches, post-’65 speeches, he’s pretty much a Socialist, his criticisms of imperialism, of capitalism. The program that he lays out is very much a Socialist. Malcolm X afterwards, you know, was very much a Socialist. His criticism of capitalism, those are very much Socialist. And even though neither of them would spell out more, but programmatically, they advocated it. So, no, later on, when we would be in the August 29th Movement, we would use the term “national informed, Socialist in content.”





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

So even though content was Socialist, the form that it took would be a national forum. And then you can look to other countries. That’s what happened in China. That’s what happened in Vietnam. Those are called national liberation fronts led by Communists, but they were still national liberations struggles. So, no, that never became a contradiction at all.





ESPINO:

So how would you define your understanding of socialism, what politics would they manifest?





BECERRA:

Then or now or when?





ESPINO:

Yeah, back then.



01:29:3001:31:04

BECERRA:

Okay. For me, what it meant to me then, okay, one, it would be there’s an end to these policies that I saw as policies at the time of imperialism, to leave the other countries alone, quit picking on them, quit invading other countries, killing people in other parts of the world. It meant self-determination, sovereign governments for blacks, for Indians, for natural minorities, for Mexicans in this country. It meant the right to self-determination for the Southwest. Okay, politically those are the issues that I meant.

On the economic level, it meant the nationalization of industries and of banks, that the source of the evil that I saw in society was private property, and private property of the mass institutions, because why else would you go to war? Why else would you subjugate people of color, except for these types of views of the world and of other people who it benefited somebody? And I thought of that and I didn’t have to listen to somebody else telling me this; I just figured that out on my own, because later when I would hear other people give it in a very mechanical way, I hated to hear it, okay, because I can’t stand it.

I’ll give you an example. Evi Alarcon, when she was the head of the Southern California Communist Party, for International Women’s Day she gave a speech and I either heard or I read a copy of it. She starts her speech, “It’s the impression of women, based on private property and the division of societies in classes,” and she goes on and all she does is tail behind what the feminists are already doing, right? So I thought, “Wait a minute. If you’re a Communist, you’re supposed to be leading these issues. You’re supposed to be developing the theory for feminists even further.” But they didn’t, no more than they did for the nationalists, for us, did they do it for the feminists, and I can understand why they would be in that position. They’re caught off guard.

So, for example, for Chicana feminists or black feminists to take that struggle up, developing from this theory and having Socialist perspectives as they do that, okay, and that’s what I like to see. And I didn’t hear that—when people talk about the roots of our oppression being based on capitalism, I don’t like to hear that because I already know that and I want to know what’s the program, okay? That’s why, even though I came to that conclusion at the time, it was because of what I saw in Vietnam, what I saw here, what I saw in reading about people around the world and what I saw happening in this country. And I knew somebody had an interest in the oppression of people of color in this country, and certainly there was questions of white-skin privilege. I saw that as support for the oppression of people of color, but I figured we’ll deal with that. Okay, we can deal with that. I hate it when I see it and I didn’t handle it the best way because I’d get pissed off. I still have a hard time dealing with it, but I think I handle it more maturely now, I think, than I did then.





ESPINO:

Okay. I’m going to end pretty soon and I want to come back to that point, but before we talk about that, what would be your—at that time, not today, but thinking about your 1968 self, your ideology, what would your utopian country look like? Would it be a country? What were you imagining?





BECERRA:

I would be imagining an Aztlán as a nation, free and independent as a Socialist nation, free and independent. That was what I dreamed about then.





ESPINO:

What would the geographic boundaries be?





BECERRA:

The same boundaries early on in “Fan the Flames.”





ESPINO:

I don’t know. Sorry.





BECERRA:

Okay. “Fan the Flames” was the position of the August 29th Movement on the Chicano national question, okay, and there the basic outlines of a Chicano nation are laid out.





ESPINO:

“Fan the Flames.”





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Do you have a copy?





BECERRA:

Yes. I’ve got to find it. I think it’s in my garage.





ESPINO:

So what would that be? Because you said something earlier about the Americas, like the American continent, or that’s what—





BECERRA:

Johnny Parsons.





ESPINO:

—Johnny Parsons said. But you’re talking from Canada down to Patagonia and Argentina. Is that what you are referring to as Aztlán?





BECERRA:

No, no, no. We’re talking about the Southwest, California through Texas.





ESPINO:

Not Mexico?



01:34:4701:36:31

BECERRA:

No, no. In fact, a lot of us were very much opposed to the idea of reunification, very strongly opposed to it. It had to do with two things. One, I talked to you earlier about our relationship, how we saw the African American struggle and ours and the legitimacy of our struggle and our particular issues based on the annexation. Okay. That’s one issue, the legitimacy of our struggle.

The other one is we felt like orphans, too, from Mexico because we were pochos, right, and Mexico didn’t want to have anything to do with us anyway. And that’s where we were raised, you know. And also we saw the corruption in Mexico and for some of us, it looked like a step backward in terms of the democratic struggle. It looked like really a step backward. Going back to one of the questions that you asked about my attitude toward Cuba and the issue of democracy and authoritarian rule and democratic rule, those types of issues, you know, I told this to my daughter about twenty years ago when she asked me that question when we were talking about Stalin.

I told her, “Look. Mexico has been an independent country, supposedly fought for democracy, tried to model itself after the U.S., and it’s been two hundred years of a struggle for democracy and a number of rebellions and revolutions, and it’s not there. Two hundred years and it’s not there.” And even today, you know, we still don’t have an independent judiciary in Mexico, and questions of free elections are still up in the air. So the issue of going back, reuniting with Mexico was like a nightmare to us. There was no amount of nationalism or pro-Mexican sentiments could overcome those types of issues that we saw. If we had advanced on a democratic process that far, why go back? Okay. And I still feel that way.

It also goes back to the issue that I told you about China, that a Maoist had told me that they saw China as the last best chance for mankind. I scratched my head. I couldn’t understand it because I thought the U.S. was not on an imperialist, capitalist basis, but on the basis of the struggle of minorities, of women, of gays, that it’s a grassroots struggle from the bottom coming up, not edicts coming up from the Central Committee down to the people, which don’t have the same—they’re not grounded as well in people’s hearts as something that comes from the bottom up.





ESPINO:

That’s fascinating. Because people were right about the Chicano Movement, well, not so much anymore, but in the early days when the first books were coming out about that history, describe it as this sort of homogeneous set of beliefs when your viewpoint is very different from other people in other organizations. Like, for example, that group that became CASA in ’73, I think, they were talking about no borders, and I don’t know if they were speaking about a reunification, but definitely a common struggle. You didn’t see a common struggle with Mexico?





BECERRA:

Yes and no, okay? Yes, in that it was just as common for me as the Vietnamese struggle was. What happened in Tlatelolco, to me it could have happened in East L.A., okay? The drone bombings right now that are killing innocent people in villages could be happening in East L.A. to me. I don’t make those kinds of distinctions. They’re the same. Martin Luther King taught us that, too, in the Riverside Church speech, you know, there’s no difference. But you were asking how I saw things in 1968. How I saw things in 1976 would be different, okay? Basically it would be the same, but it would not be as utopian as before, but it would still be the same. It would still be the same.





ESPINO:

So looking back, do you think that that was a naïve set of ideas that you had?





BECERRA:

No, no. History’s not over. [laughs]





ESPINO:

No, because you said it wouldn’t be as utopian, so that’s why I say—



01:41:11

BECERRA:

This is what I imagined then ideally, right? No, to me the possibility is still there, but that doesn’t mean that’s what I prefer at all. I prefer a very strong sense of unity with all the American working class, all nationalities, you know, but you also have to ask yourself how possible is that, is that still, and without being hateful of anybody or without being suspicious of anybody, because I’m not. At some point you say, “Okay, is it possible?” You struggle for it. You certainly struggle for it. But the right of Chicanos to self-determination, I think, is a right. And even today I still believe that, and even as a Marxist I still believe that, and I don’t think there’s anything utopian, because history’s not over, and you don’t know what’s going to happen fifty years from now and how people change their minds—I’m talking about the masses of people, not me as an individual—and how conditions change. There are a lot of ugly things that can happen and a lot of beautiful things that can happen, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but the right to self-determination, regardless, is still there.

Let me explain something else to you, because we’re talking about utopian and how practical this is. I’m a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. About twelve years ago, there was a convention that we have every four years and we pass resolutions. A lot of resolutions are passed. One of the resolutions that was passed had to do with which political party in Canada we aligned ourselves with, because our union, because we’re in the airline industry, a lot of stewards—oh, I don’t know what they call them now, but they were called stewards and stewardesses. I forget what they’re called now. There’s a more politically correct name for them. They’re both from English-speaking Canada and from French-speaking Quebec, right?

So our training schools are both in English and in French and now in Spanish, trilingual. So we align ourselves with the most progressive political party in Canada, which is in Quebec and it’s called, in French, Parti Québécois, something like that, and that’s who we align ourselves with as a union. So a resolution was passed when it was being debated on the floor, and the English-speaking Canadians spoke up in opposition to the motion of aligning ourselves with that party. They said, “The reason is because that party opposed the right of Quebec to secede from Canada, and that’s our country. How would you like it in the United States if you had people in your country, a political party, call for secession in your country? You wouldn’t like that. We oppose secession of the French-speaking province of Quebec and we want this union to oppose along with them. We understand that that’s a pro-labor party and that no party in Canada supports labor like that party in Quebec. Still, they call for secession, of the right to secession, so we stand in opposition to that resolution.” The resolution passed. So the question of secession as a practical issue in the working class, it’s still real.





ESPINO:

Wow. What was your position on it? Did you agree with what your—





BECERRA:

The union position? Hell, yes. [laughs] Hell, yes. From the time of that asshole T_____ declaring martial law and clamping down on the Québécois, yeah, since that time. Because I didn’t know they were struggling for national self-determination until that son-of-a-bitch leader of the Canadian Civil Liberties Union, right, liberal, right, becomes prime minister and declares martial law, clamps down on Quebec because of the liberation struggle. Yeah, since that time I support the people of Quebec, yes.





ESPINO:

Well, what would you say about Texas wanting to secede? That’s been thrown around. Or southern states wanting to—or the Civil War?





BECERRA:

Okay. Yeah, of course I oppose that. From a Marxist perspective, the issue of secession is always tied to the overall struggle of the working class internationally, whether or not it’s going to support the struggle for the emancipation of people, okay, of nations and peoples, and the South seceding, which was [unclear] slavery, what the fuck [unclear] And every time they raise it, they raise it in opposition to progressive policies that they see in Washington. I mean, like I talked about Senator Sessions, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Jesus Christ, that’s what secession would mean. So, no. Fuck them.





ESPINO:

So it really depends on the situation, the circumstance?





BECERRA:

Sure.





ESPINO:

It’s not secession in general?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

It’s just the particular circumstance?





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Okay, final question. I interviewed Gloria A_____, and you know now she’s very much in touch with her Tongva. Did you know that, her Tongva heritage?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

So she has great problems with the whole concept of Aztlán because she says that the Tongva were here first, so that doesn’t make sense in the sense of the first peoples in the Southwest. How do you feel about that?





BECERRA:

I think these were the first people in the Southwest, okay? That’s how I feel about it, exactly like that. The issues of different minorities in the Southwest, including Native Americans and the different tribes, you know, they call themselves nations.





ESPINO:

Yes.



01:46:30

BECERRA:

They’re not nations in the sense that we talk about nations as Marxists, you know, but certainly the question of autonomy is real, but those are issues of democracy. But that does not in any way deny Chicanos the right to self-determination.

Jesus, now I’ve got to get into a theory. Okay, unless you want to start off with this, I can get into this right now on the question of national rights, okay. All right. For us as Marxists, even though I still call myself a Marxist, even though it’s kind of contradictory because I’m not in any organization, and really to be a Marxist you have to be involved in some organization in an organized form of struggle, because you can’t be like an armchair Marxist, okay? That’s contradictory. But for us, the natural question, the issue, the discussion really starts with Stalin. Around 1905, 1907, 1909, I forget which one of those years, Stalin wrote a book because the issue of national rights presented itself to the Russians because they had so many nations from the Caucasus going back.

Remember, Europe looked down on Russia as, like, a non-white nation because most of Russia is not European, it’s mostly Asian, and so they had a kind of racist attitude towards Russia. Even Stalin comes from Georgia. He’s not Russian. So all these nations were coming up and saying they wanted the right to self-determination, and so the Communists from Russia—see, this is before the Bolshevik Revolution. They had to deal with this issue, and so Stalin writes this book. I think it’s called The Rights of Nations to Self-Determination. And what he does is he outlines the development of the modern national states in Europe, and primarily they’re in Western Europe. He says, “This is how they developed.” And then when he sums it up, he says, “These are the primary characteristics. They’re historically constituted nations with a common language, common culture, common language, and common territory.” And he says—it’s amazing how you don’t forget all these things after forty years. [laughs]





ESPINO:

.



01:50:23

BECERRA:

So when I get to Lenin. [laughs] No, I forgot those [unclear] on Lenin. But anyway, so he says some of these nations arose, and inside of these nations were other people who were in different stages of development who eventually could have became independent capitalist states, but they were trapped inside of these developed nations. He says, “Do they have the right to self-determination? Well, they’re not nations in the sense that we look at them. So, no, we’re going to be talking about issues of regional autonomy, and sometimes they’re not even issues of that. Sometimes they’re issues of language equality, sometimes they’re issues of people want to have their own Parliament where they can decide things that concern them and they would be happy to be federated into that larger union. There are many different issues involved, and even though we’re not in that stage, things have changed.” But when you look at the development of tribes in this country or anywhere else, that’s not what you see. You don’t see the development of independent national states capable of surviving, taking on threatening neighbors. I mean, Mexico hasn’t even developed to that stage with Uncle Sam. But still, you know, people have not developed to—they’re not in that type of development.

The fact that Chicanos have, to a certain extent, developed to that stage, it’s different. It’s totally different. That means that the relationships between Aztlán and Chicanos and Aztlán, and even Aztlán and the Native Americans is something that would be worked out on the basis of national equality and the demands of Native Americans, but they aren’t there right now. They are trapped inside [unclear] state. So if they’re going to have a problem, they would have a problem with the state that exists, not to the state that doesn’t exist right now, and if they want to discuss that issue with Chicanos, great, because there is a common struggle. But to say that I don’t agree with the concept of Aztlán because I’m a Native American makes no sense because you’re not even interested in the issues. I don’t know how narrow your viewpoint has to be to not even look at the struggle of your people in a capitalist system, if you know that you’re only going to view it as only a democratic struggle and oppose another democratic struggle—





ESPINO:

Or a geographic struggle that’s just confined to this region.



01:52:17

BECERRA:

Most of the time what I see, when I hear the issues, it’s the people have not—if that’s how you feel [unclear] and you identify with that tribe, then you have to think the issue out. Think it out, okay? And I don’t think they have, because when they think it out, they have to decide whether or not they’re going to be happy with the existing Socialist social system that exists. Because if they’re happy with that, then you can have no problem with Aztlán, okay, because Aztlán, whether it’s capitalist or whether Socialist, nothing changes for you, okay? So what’s your problem? Think it out. And sometimes when you’re into the Indigenous Movement, you raise legitimate democratic issues, but you haven’t thought the issue out.

I’ve listened to people, but I have not seen anybody who thinks it out and lays it out, what their program is. They might go into sweat lodges. They might talk about the Great Spirit. They can talk about a lot of things and about going back to our culture, going back to our values, and, fine, good for you. I support you 100 percent. But if you haven’t developed your program to be incorporated into a struggle against a common oppressor, then what’s your problem? Where’s the issue?





ESPINO:

What about the idea of being displaced? It’s almost a similar question, the Palestinian-Jewish question, who was here first. So if you’re the people that were here first, that are indigenous to this land, then does it not belong to you? Isn’t that what Reies in a way was kind of saying, Reies Tijerina?



01:54:2101:56:1401:58:09

BECERRA:

Okay, first, the Palestine and Israelis, okay? Yes, the land belongs to the Palestinians, and, yes, I believe in the right of of return with everything that encompasses, okay, but the issue, as a democratic issue, still has to be worked out between the Palestinians and the Israelis. I hear sometimes people get frustrated and say, “Well, the Jews should go back to Europe.” I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe in deportations. I don’t believe in ethnic cleansing. I don’t believe in any shit like that, okay? I don’t believe in a two-state solution. I believe in one state, a secular democratic state where religious fundamentalism is outlawed, because that’s the biggest, I think, obstacle to peace there, and because everything can be worked out on a secular basis.

I believe in a democratic secular state primarily of two nationalities, a binational secular democratic state, okay? And as much as I believe in the right of return for Palestinians, I do not believe in deportations for Jews. I believe you have to work it out. You’re there. Work it out. And that’s why I don’t believe in a two-state solution. That’s not working anything out, okay? Really, to say you believe in a two-state solution is to say that you don’t have any faith in humanity to work out these kinds of problems. You have no faith in mankind. It’s bullshit. If that’s a temporary [unclear] has to be done, you have to accept it, but at the same time, it’s a total rejection of your faith in mankind.

It’s bullshit. People can work it out, you know, and they can, but there are things that get in the way: imperialist policies, white nationalist policies in Israel, the religious fundamentalism both in Israel and with the Palestinians and throughout the Middle East before religion took another form and took the form of radical Marxism-Leninism that had a very infantile attitude towards the issue of Israel, you know, “Drive the Zionists to the sea.” Bullshit, you know. It’s bullshit. That’s not what you do. And now the religion has changed from Marxism-Leninism as a religion, not as a science, but as a religion. Now it’s Islam, not real Islam, but fundamental Islam again, like you had fundamental in terms of Marxism-Leninism. You don’t look at things scientifically. But, no, that’s Palestine and Israel, so those are different.

Now, as far as coming back here, you know, about who was here first, well, how far do you want to go back? Ten thousand years? Fifteen thousand years? Twenty thousand years? But in terms of the European invasion, okay, so Europeans come and the Europeans are going to come, whether they came to Mexico or here, and you can’t turn history back. It’s here. And so [unclear] has to take place in that context. You’re not going to drive the white man out, you’re not going to drive the Europeans out, and I don’t even want to drive them out. They’re my brothers and sisters, period, and I love them just as much as I love anybody else. I don’t hate them. This idea that this is ours because we were here first, no, it’s yours because you’re born here, okay? That’s why it’s yours. That’s why you don’t deport illegal aliens. Whether they cross an imaginary line or whether they’re born here, it doesn’t matter, no. The idea that it’s ours because we were here first, no. It’s nice, it’s romantic, but it’s just not an issue.

To me it’s not an issue. We say that to the white man, too, but I know it doesn’t have any legitimacy. To me it doesn’t have any legitimacy that we were here, no. The issue is that we were a republic, okay, and a part of that republic was annexed by another republic, and in that annexation, the basis for national oppression took place of an independent republic. It didn’t take place of a wilderness, which was just as wrong, because even though treaties were made with the Native Americans, even though they were supposedly equal, okay, those treaties, you know, had said, “This is going to be yours for as long as the world exists. This is your land,” and then you fuck ‘em. Goddamn, you know?

So, no, those treaties are real, okay? And remember the Indians made those treaties, okay? That land is theirs. By law that land is theirs when they made those treaties, and, yes, those treaties have to be enforced. As long as the Americans want those treaties in force, yes, to me they have to be enforced because these were treaties made by Native Americans that forever that that was going to be their land. And, yes, I mean, now we’re talking about real program, real issues, not concepts, you know, that we were here first. I mean, those are the ways you approach those issues. Whose oil is that? If that land was given to—it doesn’t matter if it was in Southwest. People that bargain with the American government, and that oil is yours if it’s on your reservation. It doesn’t matter that that land was taken away from Mexicans. Tough. [unclear] an agreement [unclear] into that, bamboozled into that, it doesn’t matter.

They went into it in good faith. It’s yours, period. But those are issues that you work out, democratic issues. You don’t deal with issues on a metaphysical basis, you know, we were here first. No, there are real issues to be resolved, and that’s how you approach them. That’s why [unclear] question that we had as Brown Berets. That’s the only way you keep Aztlán and the right to self-determination as a real practical issue. Because the issue will come up again just like it did for the people at Quebec, which is why they continue to vote in Quebec [unclear] on the right to self-determination, just like you have in Puerto Rico. People still vote on those plebiscites. We have that same right and we’d never give that right up. That’s how I feel about it.





ESPINO:

That’s a lot. Okay, I’m going to stop it because it marks two hours here.





BECERRA:

Okay.





ESPINO:

And I’m going to stop it right now.

Session Four (June 7, 2013)





ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is June 7. I’m interviewing Cruz Olmeda Becerra at his home in Commerce, California. I wanted to start today—did I give the date, June 7? Yes. You told me last time how you met David, how you got involved in the Young Chicanos for Community Action. Can you tell me, if you recall, how that group transformed into the Brown Berets, what you remember from that?





BECERRA:

Yes. Before I start, though, I want to raise something. When I’ve talked to you before, I tried to express what was happening in terms of what was happening at the time, how people thought, what was going through our heads and what I saw. So when I talk to you, I have told you—for example, I never use the “N-word” when I’m talking, but I used it when I was talking about southerners, if you recall, when I was in the navy and how they talked, okay? I never use the word “whorehouse,” but I used it when I was talking to you because that’s how we talked when we were in the navy, okay? So when I’m answering your questions, I’m trying to do it in the historical context that it occurred in, okay? So I make that clear, okay?





ESPINO:

Perfect. Yes. Thank you. That’s important.





BECERRA:

Yes. Okay, you’re asking about my role in—





ESPINO:

Well, what you remember about—there are different stories about how Young Citizens became the Brown Berets and why certain people didn’t follow that transition from Young Citizens to Young Chicanos to Brown Berets. Like Vicki Castro, Moctesuma Esparaza, and some others started off with David Sanchez in the Young Citizens, but didn’t make that transition with him. And then you came in, you said, when it was Young Chicanos and then you made the transition to the Brown Berets, and what you remember from that and why it happened and, I don’t know, maybe what your role was in that new organization.



00:03:5800:06:1700:08:15

BECERRA:

Okay, the reason really that Moctesuma and Vicki Castro were not—what happened, they went to school. They left to go to school full-time, and Moctesuma was, I think, at UCLA, so they couldn’t be there all the time. They had to adjust to being in school and studying and everything. They would still be active. They just weren’t there at La Piranya. They weren’t there when the transition took place into the Brown Berets. What happened, I came into La Piranya and I talked with David. He told me how they had changed the name to Young Chicanos for Community Action, and we talked about why that was important, you know, to change the name. I think I talked to you before how we were making the break with the traditional liberals, the Mexican Americans, the Mexican Americans and the Democratic Party and the liberalism that we saw, that that wasn’t enough, that more radical change was necessary. So we were not going to call ourselves Mexican Americans. We were going to use the term “Chicano,” Mexican American, the term “Mexican American” being reserved to the sellouts or the people who were not making that transition to a more militant and more focused attitude on Chicano issues. And so we would use the term “Mexican American” in a very derisive manner in referring to people, right?

So what happens then, we go to a student conference, we see some students that are wearing black berets and they’re wearing, like, fatigue jackets and they’re smoking cigars, right, so we knew immediately the image they were trying to project. These were students from San Jose, maybe San Jose State College, at this conference. So we came back and we talked about that, specifically Johnny Parsons and Manuel Alva. He used both names. His real name was Manuel Alva, but he used the name Johnny Parsons, okay, here in L.A. In San Diego, everybody knows him by Manuel Alva because he spent the last years of his life in San Diego around Chicano Park and the artist community, down in the Chicano artist community down there. Here he was Johnny Parsons. He talked about the importance of making that psychological break and causing a polarization in the community to break with the liberal Mexican American image and dialogue and go in a more radical direction. He said that was very important and the way to do it would be with the Brown Beret and with the bush jackets, because the beret was like a symbol of urban guerilla warfare from World War II and France. Urban guerillas, that’s what they wore, and in Spain as well. And so, you know, there was a history to that and we would be tying in with that history, apart from the fact that the Panthers were wearing it as well, and we very much respected the Panthers, almost to the point of idolizing them. They were our brothers, you know, and we really saw them very much as our brothers and in a sense we would be, like, in a sense emulating them in terms of form. Content would be different because our issues were different.

The basis for our issues was different, even though we still had to deal with police brutality as they did, bad education, same types of issues, urban issues as they had, but we had other issues that we had to deal with and also we had a different type of a movement that we were involved in because at that point the Chicano Movement mushrooms. Especially after the walkouts, it just mushroomed, and there was organizations for everything from welfare rights to social workers to teachers to union. We became more and more active as Chicanos, Chicanos in the unions and all the community groups, the churches. Everybody was involved, the students and then the farm workers. So it just mushroomed, and so ours was a little different than what the Black Panther Party was faced with, how they were dealing with things. So we started pushing that militancy in all the demonstrations we went to, the community meetings we went to, and it became important because people would see us and they would know that uniform stands for something. There’s a message there, and so people knew and people respected that, you know. There was no compromising. This is it. This is the way it is, and people have to take a stand of what side are you going to be on. And that became so important, the question of identity, of Chicano identity, and a type of Chicano, a militant Chicano identity, not a bourgeois, liberal Mexican American identity, okay. So made a distinction there between those two, those two identities, and that was important.

At the time, the student organizations were called United Mexican American Students. East L.A. College was MASA. Another one would be UMAS, United Mexican American Students. At San Jose State it was MASC, Mexican American Student Confederation. So when MEChA comes along, the name was changed. The “Mexican American” was taken out and it became [Spanish name of organization]. All of us were a part of that. I’m not saying it’s just the Brown Berets. It was throughout the movement this was taking place. The students on the campus were just as much aware of this and taking part in it as anybody else. Just happened we did it within the Brown Berets.





ESPINO:

Were you talking about the—I mean, can you maybe set the stage of how these discussions were occurring, or were you thinking about these things on your own individually or would you sit down and talk about it with other members?



00:10:01

BECERRA:

No, we sat down and talked about it, especially with Johnny Parsons. In the group you had, like, thinkers, okay, and thinkers would be people like Tacos, which was David Torres, Joe Razo because he was around us. He was also a thinker. He thought broader on issues. We had Johnny Parsons and myself, and then there would be other people drawn into it, like hippie, which would be David Salcedo, who were drawn in to having these kinds of discussions.

Other people were not too interested in that kind of discussion. They were more interested in the show, okay, putting on the brown beret, kind of showing up somewhere, and not dealing with the political content of what we were doing. If you look at what was then called the program of the Brown Berets, it’s okay in the fact that it was very simple, a very easy, simple one. In that sense it was okay because it would be hard for people to argue against it. In that sense it was okay. In another sense it was not, because the program didn’t go much further than that. So those of us, we were always thinking about these issues. We didn’t stick to just that program, okay, and this became apparent. That’s one of the reasons that David comes back from the Poor People’s March, back to La Piranya, because these kinds of issues are now being discussed.





ESPINO:

So there’s the thinkers, there are the people who show up for actions, and then how would you categorize some—are there more groupings of members?





BECERRA:

Yeah, there were new people, a lot of new people who were showing up, mostly kids from the high schools. And when that happens, I get, like, a little bit disappointed with that, because if you do that, the character of the organization changes because now—I mean, you can’t ask kids to do the things that we were doing. You’re going to get them in trouble and it becomes dangerous for them. You can’t do that. It also became the conduit for Bobby—I forget his last name—the cop that came in from Wilson High School, supposedly from Wilson High School. He was an undercover cop and he claimed to be from Wilson High School and he infiltrated the Brown Berets. He was the first one.





ESPINO:

Sumaya? No.





BECERRA:

No. It might have been Bobby Avila, something like that.





ESPINO:

Yes.





BECERRA:

So he became a conduit because he could pose as a student. So things were changing in a direction that I wasn’t crazy about. I wasn’t becoming anti-Brown Beret at all. I was not becoming, like, angry at the organization or anything like that. I just saw that things weren’t going in the direction that I wanted to see them going, and the thing is, you know, I thought we should be going in a more militant direction and David thought otherwise, okay? And in reality, David was right, because had we gone in the direction that I wanted to go, a lot of us would have gotten killed.





ESPINO:

And this is you looking back and saying, in hindsight—



00:13:44

BECERRA:

In hindsight, yes, in hindsight, because young people would have gotten killed. As it was, people got into trouble around the Biltmore and things like that, you know, and so really that was not the direction for us to be going, even though at the time that’s the only direction to be going, you know, because that’s the way—you have to look at what was taking place in society, the question of the war and of the civil rights struggle and the question of police. And it left you, like, no other direction to go. See, like, that’s the only way to go, the desperation, you know, the anger, everything.

So that’s the direction we all moved. I mean, look at the white kids. I mean, even later on they would become the Weather Underground, stuff like that. So it was very—how do you call it—turbulent at that period, and those are the directions we were going.





ESPINO:

How would you describe your fundamental difference with David Sanchez back then, looking back? Not in hindsight, but just trying to recreate your thinking back then, considering what you just said, you know, the social, political, economic dynamic of the Chicano community and David Sanchez’s viewpoint.





BECERRA:

It would be really hard to come up with something on that, and the reason was that when the group of us that left the Brown Berets left the Brown Berets, we didn’t leave attacking anybody or criticizing anybody. We just thought things had to be done differently and we defended the Brown Berets still. We were very, very proud of our history with the Brown Berets, having been founders of the Brown Berets, and we would not criticize the Brown Berets. I remember that, because I have a recording of an interview by Stan Steiner from 1968, where he interviewed us for, like, an hour for a book that he wrote, and I remember in that we would not criticize the Brown Berets. We said, “No, we’re very proud of the Brown Berets,” even though, like, some of the differences with David would be more questions of personality than they would be of political issues, because there was no time to have a meeting where we were going to discuss these issues and work them out or talk them out. There just wasn’t a time or anything where that took place.





ESPINO:

Right. But you said that you wanted the organization to go in a different direction.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

So I’m just assuming—and I’ve interviewed David Sanchez, who does talk about his authoritarian leadership, which he recognizes that it was basically a top-down organization. So when you say the Brown Berets were not going in the direction, I’m assuming it’s based on David Sanchez’s leadership.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

So David Sanchez was taking the organization—and correct me if I’m wrong—in a direction that you didn’t want it to go.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

So I’m asking you what was that difference. Where was he taking it and where did you want to take it?





BECERRA:

I wanted us to emulate the Black Panther Party, okay? He did not. And in hindsight, of course, he was right, but at the time, no, I didn’t think we were going in the right direction. So those of us who would talk about what needed to be done about the issues in the community decided, no, there was no basis to stick around and fight over this issue. It just didn’t make sense. Just leave, you know, just leave.





ESPINO:

What were your key issues? What were the issues that you saw as the critical issues for the—there were so many.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

What did you view as the critical issues?





BECERRA:

You know, now I can’t even remember. I can’t even remember now.





ESPINO:

Because then the Free Clinic becomes—I know you had already left the organization, but it was one of those—like the Black Panthers were doing the free breakfast.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Were those things that you thought were important, or did you think that was the wrong direction to take the organization?





BECERRA:

I thought the free breakfast program was the wrong direction, okay? I didn’t agree with that. I didn’t think that’s what we should be doing. But remember, the Black Panther Party, they had, like, two wings. It had the militant wing, which would have been Huey and Eldridge Cleaver and maybe Bobby Seale, and it had another wing, which would have been, like, Elaine Brown, and they were not into the machismo of showing up at the Capitol steps with shotguns and all that kind of stuff. They were more into organizing and organizing the community, and so they would be more responsible for all those types of programs in the community because that’s the way they felt the organization should go. And I was not inclined to go in the direction of free breakfast programs and stuff like that. Even though that was the Black Panther Party, that was not what I was interested in.





ESPINO:

What did you think needed to happen?





BECERRA:

Okay, at the time—it seems crazy now, okay, and it was crazy. I felt that what we needed was a Chicano underground organization like kind of had existed in the past in New Mexico, you know, la mano negra- what is it blanca? I forget what it was called, but at that time I did know. But it would be like an underground—sort of like a Chicano vigilante type of organization that would strike back at the people who were responsible for violence against Chicanos, and that’s what I wanted to see. Obviously, you can’t do that if you’re a Brown Beret because you’re very, very visible, okay, so you can’t do that. And that’s the contradiction of being in the Brown Berets. And some of the people agreed that that’s what we had to do. And then what happened, as we started leaving and we started thinking and talking about what we could do practically, that’s when we started developing La Junta, which was not going to be that kind of an organization.





ESPINO:

So how did you feel about the walkouts? Was that something that you thought was a good action? Did you think that that was going to be effective and create the change or the improvements? Or I don’t know how to define your ideology at the time, but attack the issues as you saw them?





BECERRA:

I saw the walkouts as a super militant act that was being carried out by students in the high schools and it was carried out in direct contradiction to the authorities, right? They’re clearly a violation of law, obviously, especially for us who were not students, but it was a direct [unclear] the educational system for what it was doing. So I saw it as a very militant, very revolutionary act on the part of the students. It was nonviolent, but very revolutionary nonetheless. So it was exactly what I thought had to happen.





ESPINO:

Do you remember when you first heard about the walkouts?



00:23:22

BECERRA:

Yes. In Young Chicanos for Community Action, we were already discussing it, and then going into January, then we were frustrated because it wasn’t taking place. And then in February, one of the reporters from the Eastside newspaper—it might have been the Eastside Sun—came to interview us at La Piranya, and we discussed the walkouts before they had taken place and why they were necessary and how pissed off we were that they hadn’t taken place. So what happens, the newspaper publishes that, and I think it was in the headlines of the newspaper, so now it’s all over the community. Now all the students know about it, all the teachers know about it, all the administrators know about it. “What the hell is this?” And so the newspaper really publicized what was going to happen in March, right? And then one day, because we’re frustrated—and then some of us that aren’t taking part in the meetings, okay, the organizing meetings for the walkouts, like, I was not taking part in any of those meetings, and most of the Brown Berets were not taking part in those meetings, even though those meetings were taking place and there was some Brown Berets that did participate and also because I was working the swing shift, I wasn’t around to see all that.

But one day we run into Sal Castro at La Raza magazine, and he was in a happy mood, right? [laughs] So we talked to him, and he says, “Goddamn it, when the hell are the walkouts going to take—when are the kids going to walk out [unclear]?” I think these were his exact words, “All right, walk ’em out, walk ’em out, walk ’em out.” [laughs] So he gave the green light, you know, he gave the green light. So as soon as he gave the green light, bam, it happens. We were out there. The Brown Berets were out there. The kids—the word spread. As soon as the walkout started, it was all over. We didn’t have Facebook and all that other stuff in those days, but the word was out fast.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

And all the students knew. They were calling each other up and so everybody knew.





ESPINO:

Were you part of that propaganda campaign of getting the word out? What role did you play?





BECERRA:

None. None. In the preparation for it, none, the planning, none. The only meetings that I participated in were at La Piranya Coffeehouse, where we discussed the walkouts themselves.





ESPINO:

How did you know what your role was going to be?





BECERRA:

Oh, we already knew what we were going to do. We were going to go to schools, tear down the fences, and walk the kids out. Kids already knew what they were going to do, and the administrators knew what was going to take place. That’s why they shut off—the fire alarms were shut down, which is against the law, but they didn’t care. So is a walkout; that’s also against the law. So we already knew what we were going to do. Garfield High School, I think, was the first one, the first one I remember, and we waited till the bell rang and the students were walking between classes and then we started chanting, “Walkout!” And they started coming out.





ESPINO:

You, yourself, you were at Garfield?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Because from what I’m hearing, different people were assigned different—it depends. Everything is different for every group because there were so many involved. But, like, for example at La Raza, they were so close to Lincoln, that’s where they went first. So you’re saying you went to Garfield.



00:26:16

BECERRA:

Yeah, I went to two, three. The first day was at Garfield, and then the second day or maybe the same—I can’t remember—was at Roosevelt, and that’s where I saw Carlos Montes at Roosevelt. I saw him. He jumped on a gate to try and tear down the gate that was held together by a chain, and I thought, “He’s never going to tear that down. He’s crazy.” Nah, that gate came down, you know.

And then after that, I got a call from Wilmington, and a friend of mine’s sister was there. So she called me and she says, “The kids are ready to walk out. You’ve got to come down so we can walk the kids out.” So I went down there, and, yeah, there was a walkout. The kids walked out, and it was a little bit more militant, a little bit more like vandalism because they were putting trash cans on fire and rolling them down the halls—





ESPINO:

Huh. Wow.





BECERRA:

—which was crazy, you know? I was arrested there. I was arrested. At Banning High School in Wilmington, I was arrested.





ESPINO:

By yourself? Were you alone?





BECERRA:

No, I was with somebody else, but I can’t remember who. But I was arrested by myself, yes.





ESPINO:

But I mean you went as a Brown Beret or with other Brown Berets?





BECERRA:

Yes, with other Brown Berets. But I just can’t remember who. Damn, it’s been forty-five years. I can’t remember who was with me.





ESPINO:

So you were arrested at Wilmington High School.





BECERRA:

No, at Banning High School in Wilmington.





ESPINO:

Banning High School in Wilmington. And that was around that same week?





BECERRA:

Yes, it was all in the same week.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

Within days of each other.





ESPINO:

Can you tell me, maybe walk me through what happened at Garfield and then the subsequent days after that and what you did?





BECERRA:

Yeah, at Garfield, after we were chanting and the kids were walking out, everybody started—





ESPINO:

That was the next high school after Wilson.





BECERRA:

That was what?





ESPINO:

Wilson was first.





BECERRA:

I don’t know.





ESPINO:

Yeah, Wilson was first and then Garfield was after that.





BECERRA:

Yeah, I didn’t even know where Wilson was. I knew it was in East L.A., but I didn’t know where it was. I wasn’t from East L.A. We were all from Compton.





ESPINO:

That’s right, yeah.





BECERRA:

And this was my first months in East L.A. So I’d hear all the people talking about Belvedere Junior High School, all these other high schools. I didn’t know where they were.





ESPINO:

That’s funny.





BECERRA:

I’m from Compton. No, Garfield was the first one I was at. We walked the kids out, you know. We were chanting and stuff, and the kids were all in front of the gate and at first there were hundreds of kids out there. And the sheriffs came by and they got between the kids and the fence. They all lined up, I guess like as if the kids were going to attack the school. They’re walking out of the school. They weren’t going to attack the school. [laughs] And then one of the cops recognized me, you know. I remember who he was. I forget his name, but he was a sergeant and he spotted me, you know, among the students. So he pointed his finger at me and told the other cops to get me, right? So the cops came, started coming at me, right? So all the students blocked them. They all closed ranks so they couldn’t get me, and so I ran. I left. I ran down to a cafe or a bar or something that was down the street, and I called KGFJ, the radio station, to tell them the walkouts were taking place. And so then they announced it on the radio—





ESPINO:

Oh, wow.





BECERRA:

—that the walkouts were taking place. At the time, the people who answered the phone there, they weren’t very supportive, and there was sort of like a jealousy or like we were trying to copy them or take attention away from the issues of the black community, right, which is very normal attitude to have when you don’t think about the issue and just react right away. If the people that answered the phone had been in the Black Panther Party or the US organization or been members of the Black Congress, that would have been different. They would have wanted to know everything. They would have been very supportive, but the person who happened to answer the phone wasn’t. And so you’re always going to have the more progressive have a different attitude than people who don’t know. And then I left. I didn’t stay there. And the next day, I think, I was at Roosevelt again, the first time on this one.





ESPINO:

Did you wear your Brown Beret and that whole thing?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes.





ESPINO:

So you weren’t worried about—I mean, did you think that you were going to be identified by your—because I think it was David who said that he wouldn’t wear it because he didn’t want to stand out. Was that, like, a general thinking?





BECERRA:

No, we wore it to stand out, okay? [laughs]





ESPINO:

Like he wouldn’t wear it to the Chicano Moratorium and some other big marches.





BECERRA:

No. The whole purpose of the Brown Beret uniform, the bush jacket and the beret, was to stand out, you know? No.





ESPINO:

You weren’t worried about being identified easily?





BECERRA:

No, not at all. And remember, we went through dozens of times of the sheriffs pulling us out of La Piranya Coffeehouse, lining us up against the wall, searching us, taking our IDs, writing incident reports who was there, all our names, you know, and taking them back to the station, building up dossiers on us. I mean, that happened over and over and over again. So it’d be too late to worry about, you know, if they’re going to recognize us. I mean, they recognize us right away. They knew who we were, so it was too late for that. It wouldn’t have bothered me anyway, you know.





ESPINO:

So how would they treat you? What would they say to you?





BECERRA:

The cops?





ESPINO:

Yeah. Like what was their spiel or what was their way of—they were obviously harassing you. How did that manifest verbally?





BECERRA:

First they would pull us out. Everybody had to line up against there. First, that’s harassment just by itself.





ESPINO:

Yeah.



00:33:3300:35:07

BECERRA:

And making us identify ourselves so they can take down our names of who we are, which is really politically reactionary, right? And we knew what they were doing. At times they would, like, two cops would get around you, right, or three, and just by the way that they moved and the way they talked, their attitude, they were looking for an excuse to beat the hell out of you, right? And you knew it and they wanted you to know that, okay? So, yeah, sometimes you said, “Oh, shit, I’m going to get my ass kicked now,” you know, but you had to take it. You’ve got to stay there. You’ve got to take it. Another time when I was arrested with David, David was in another police car, I think. Or maybe we were both in the same car. We were both in Brown Berets and are dressed with our berets and everything, and the cop was taking us to the police station. He was all pissed off and he says, “So you guys believe in class distinctions in society.” And so he was telling us, like, we were Communists, you know.

We weren’t Communists, you know, and so just to fuck with him, you know, I told him, “No, we don’t believe in classism. We believe in race distinctions.” [laughs] And he got all pissed off, you know. The reason he got pissed off and scared—first he got scared and then pissed off—was he could handle us as Communists. He could isolate us and everything, but as Chicanos he couldn’t do shit because he was surrounded by a million Chicanos all around. What the hell is he going to do? “Oh, you guys are Chicanos?” “Yeah. What are you going to do?” Nothing, you know. And that scared the hell out of him because they didn’t want us to become a movement like the Black Movement, and this scared them. They weren’t worried about a Communist Movement. They were worried, just like J. Edgar Hoover, of a Brown Movement, especially if we hooked up with the black one. That was their nightmare. And then when he asked me that, I played right into it, “Yeah, race distinctions.” “Oh, shit.” It scared him. One time, afterwards, I was in the Brown Berets [unclear] La Junta, when the cops were taking us out. We were at Chuco’s house, and the cops did really just come out from behind the bushes. I mean, they were behind the bushes waiting for us, and [unclear], you know, IDs, up against the wall, searches. And we were wearing our Mao Tse-tung buttons, right? And then they looked for marks, you know, see if we’re addicts.

And the white cop says, “I can’t believe it. I’ve got four Mexicans right here and not one of you guys has tracks.” And we said, “We’re not going to have tracks.” And he says, “Yeah, well, you know what? That guy you got right there, he’s sending all the heroin over here so you guys can get addicted.” And we said, “That’s stupid. The heroin is not for us. It’s for white people, all your hippies that are just smoking dope and taking heroin and all this. That’s for you white people. That’s what that’s for. What do you think we wear these for? We know where we’re getting that—.” Oh, you know, we’re fucking with the bank, you know, that we’re smoking heroin from the Chinese to feed the white people to make them addicts. And these dumb mother—they believe it. They believe it because they don’t know. They don’t know Chicanos. They don’t know nothing. They believed it and they would get scared. You could see it on their faces. They were like, “What the hell,” because they didn’t know what to expect from us. They don’t have that advantage anymore because they didn’t know anything about Mexicans then.





ESPINO:

So you’re saying that people like that feared a race war?





BECERRA:

Yes, that’s what they were afraid of. They weren’t afraid of—this isn’t the thirties anymore where they would be afraid of a class war. They were afraid of a race war, yes, the cops, the cops.





ESPINO:

Did anybody ever say anything directly related to that, that you can remember?





BECERRA:

The police?





ESPINO:

Yes.





BECERRA:

Not to me.





ESPINO:

So you’re saying you could just see it in their faces.



00:37:41

BECERRA:

Yes, yes. But you have to remember that they made it like their duty. I’m sure that when they were at roll call before they start the shift, they’re going to be told about the Brown Berets, and there was a lot of things that we would find out later they were telling them. They would go to community meetings, right, because kids would come and tell us that they’d gone to a parents-teachers thing, a big conference, and the sheriffs—Calderon was the name, Sergeant Calderon was from the sheriff’s station, and he would address the teachers and tell them, “These are the Brown Berets. They’re troublemakers,” all kinds of right-wing, bad stuff about us. And he would say, “And we have information that they’re being funded by foreign sources.” [laughs] I wish Kadafi had given us some money, right? [laughs] Kadafi wasn’t around yet. So we asked them, “What did the people say?”

“Nothing. They ignored him. They ignored him.” They didn’t even know what the Brown Berets were. Now they know. So they were, like, doing advertisement for us, you know, and they did more advertising for the Brown Berets than we were able to do because they had all the cops everywhere, the newspapers, the cops, because they were reacting to what was taking place. So at that time they didn’t know how to react to us.





ESPINO:

I don’t know if it’s just a stereotype that you see in the movies, but when there’s that kind of harassment, there’s like verbal shaming and humiliating. It’s almost like what happens in the military when you’re in boot camp, you know, the stereotype of the sergeant humiliating the private, I guess it would be. But did that kind of thing occur?





BECERRA:

Between the cops and us?





ESPINO:

Yes.





BECERRA:

No, not with me. I didn’t see it.





ESPINO:

They didn’t call you names and—



00:39:35

BECERRA:

No. See, the thing is that they—one time I was arrested, okay? They found a weapon there where I was, that had been discharged. The weapon was registered to me, okay. They arrested me. They went to interrogate me, and I wouldn’t talk, nothing. And they had me at Hollenbeck and they pulled out my jacket and they were looking at it, and the cops all gathered round to read the jacket on me. And then they’d look at me and read it. They’d look at me. I said, “Oh, shit.”

And so before they did that, one of the cops had come in and they said, “You know what? We haven’t got time to fuck around with punks like you. We’re going to take you upstairs.” I said, “Oh, shit. There goes my ribs.” But after they read my jacket, they decided they weren’t going to touch me, and the reason was because I think they were afraid of a community response, okay, because by then we were getting roots in the community as Brown Berets. We had gotten roots in the community. I wasn’t a Brown Beret anymore, but my jacket was still there, and so they did not want any more—by this time the walkouts had taken place, the indictments had come down, they’d seen the response of the community to the indictments, so they were not eager to beat up anybody anymore, anybody who was an activist. Now, if they get a chance and you’re by yourself somewhere and they can do what they want, that’s different. But, no, I never had that issue.





ESPINO:

So you were almost untouchable, although you were harassed?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes.





ESPINO:

That’s interesting.





BECERRA:

They hated us and they harassed us, but they were afraid to go too far. They didn’t know who we were. They didn’t know what to expect.





ESPINO:

Right. You never got beat up by the police?



00:42:59

BECERRA:

No. Oh, yeah, that one time that I just told you about when I was arrested, I wasn’t beat up and I had, like—they did beat me, but I had a lot of sympathy for the cops that night. They pulled up. They were scared. They had their high beams on me. They had their .357 Magnums aimed at me. They found the clips with the bullets in them in my pocket. They didn’t know where the gun was. They didn’t know what they’d walked into. It was dark. They could have walked into an ambush, they didn’t know, so they wanted to know where the gun was. So one of the cops took the clip in his hand and he started punching me in the ribs, asking, “Where’s the gun?” Bam! Bam! “Where’s the gun?” And I was so scared, that I could not feel him hitting me and I was just glad they had a shadow when they had those two guns aimed at me.

Okay, now, in real life, not in book life or civil liberties life, but in real life, those cops acted as normal, and under the circumstances, as normal as they should have acted. They could have killed me, but they didn’t. When they wanted information, they were scared for their lives and then they beat me to try and get information out of me, and it wasn’t a prolonged beating. It only lasted for about twenty seconds, right? And I can’t blame them. They were scared. One of the cops that was there—there was two cops—would tell me a few years later that he was scared shitless because he remembered that arrest. He says, “That was my very first bust,” he says. I met him because he had a part-time job at the White Front store and he was selling paint, and that’s when I ran into him. I didn’t recognize him, he recognized me, and that’s when he told me. He says, “I was scared shitless that night.”

I said, “Yeah.” So I could appreciate what he had just gone through, you know. Sometimes these cops can be racist and everything, but you still can’t deny the fact that they get into some very dangerous situations and they risk their lives to keep people safe, you know. In spite of being racist assholes, they still do that. That’s the contradiction.





ESPINO:

Right. But back then when you were—I mean I just look at some of the propaganda in La Causa and some of the literature about “the pig” and that kind of thing. Did you have that viewpoint back then?





BECERRA:

Yes. now?





ESPINO:

Yeah.



00:44:33

BECERRA:

No, I didn’t get that viewpoint until that night. They educated me when they were beating on me, and I thought about it afterwards. That was my first reality education, okay, because I understand the cops kill innocent people brutally, but it’s not the cops. It’s particular cops. And if the cops [unclear] really go out of their way to filter those people out because they don’t want problems. They have enough problems. They don’t need more problems. So they don’t want those kinds of cops. Today; not then. Then it was a totally different world.

But that night, yeah, I got an education on what those guys go through, because I thought about it afterwards. You’re the first person I ever tell about this. I’ve never told anybody in any public—because I’ve gone to a lot of meetings and a lot of things on police brutality. I never tell anybody about this because I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t think it’s fair to say, “Yeah, I was once beat up.” Shit, they could have killed me. They didn’t do anything that I think was wrong, okay? They were scared, they feared for their lives, they didn’t know what they’d walked into, and I don’t blame them. I don’t blame them at all for what they did, so I never tell anybody about it. And if somebody’s getting down on police brutality, I don’t say, “Yeah, I once [unclear].” No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not right.





ESPINO:

Do you agree that police brutality—because when you talk to—also Carlos Montes. Carlos Montes and David Sanchez, they both talk about that being one of their most important issues as Brown Beret members: brutality.



00:46:23

BECERRA:

Yes, it very much was. It very, very much was and for quite a while, for quite a few years after that too. It took time to change the police department. Same thing with the LAPD. It took quite a while to change it. But, yeah, that was the number-one issue for us. I mean, every day they just messed with us and messed with us, and we used to have to go to—I used to see pictures of the guys that were all beat up. We’d have to go to demonstrations and support them, where the Montebello Police Department had beat the hell out of them. And now I’ve got to call them up and thank Detective [unclear] for helping me out.

So, yeah, the world changes, and when the world changes, you can’t live in the world that existed in the past. So you have to understand that it has changed and adapt to the new world. There are still going to be issues, but they may be different or they may take on a different form. Maybe the way you struggle around those issues is going to be different than what you did before, but the world has changed, and you can’t deny that.





ESPINO:

Well, you, growing up—and we talked about your role in the military and the racism that you witnessed against blacks primarily, but I guess I’d like to know what was your big issue? What was the thing that you felt like caused you to have your consciousness awakened?



00:48:2500:50:03

BECERRA:

There was two things. One was Vietnam and my participation in Vietnam, which pissed me off, and the other one, I mean, just shattered me, [unclear], everything. The other thing was the racism, yeah, and racism against Chicanos, because I’d grown up with that and it just built up and built up all those years. Those were the two main things. It was not police brutality. Police brutality was—I didn’t see it as an issue just of police brutality. I saw it tied into racism, okay, as a manifestation of racism. Today I don’t see it that way. Today I see police brutality as a manifestation of a dehumanizing of people by the police, okay, where it’s not going to matter what race you are. And I’m not saying that race doesn’t matter. When you have a Chicano cop in Fullerton beat a white guy to death, you can’t say it’s racism. That’s something else.

I may have told you this before, that my daughter did this study on feminist [unclear] Juarez. One of the things she told me about was—it might have been the Green River killer somewhere in northern California, Oregon. He would kidnap prostitutes, rape them, kill them, and bury them. And sometimes he wouldn’t bury them; he’d just throw them on the side of the road. The cops would find them, okay, and they’d record it, take photographs and all that, but they would not conduct an investigation and they would not link all these women together. So somebody asked, “Why didn’t you follow up on that investigation?” “Oh, that’s a NHI.” They said, “What’s an NHI?” “No human involved.” That kind of an attitude the cops will have towards people, where that white guy that Chicano cop beat to death wasn’t a white man. He wasn’t even human. He was a homeless bum, okay, which is beneath being a human being. That’s why they beat him up. If a black man is homeless or a white guy’s homeless or anybody, they’re beneath being a human being, so it’s okay to beat them up and kill them, and I think that’s really the issue. Sometimes racism will be a manifestation of that, but it’s really the dehumanizing of other people, and it happens all the time.

Like I was watching MSNBC cover that Boston bombing, the terrorist bombing, right, and all the networks that carried it, like, forever, and interviewing the victims, interviewing the families of the victims, saying how bad this is and all—I mean, they just would not stop. And I thought, “Fuck, this is going on every day, the drones that Obama sends out. They don’t bother you?” I think that’s part of the dehumanizing aspect, because only these lives matter, right? Those other lives someplace else don’t matter, the total dehumanization of other people. And you think it’s not going to come back here? It does come back here. When Obama orders the killing of four Americans somewhere else, of course it comes back here. And I think that’s the issue that the police have, is the dehumanizing of other people because they’re thugs, they’re hoodlums, they’re dope addicts, they’re prostitutes, they’re anything else, they’re homeless, they’re bums. They don’t care. They’re not human anymore. They look at them through a different type of eye. That’s why you can go to Skid Row and take all the belongings of all these people and put them in a trash can and throw them away, because these people don’t matter. That’s all they have in the world and it’s going in a dumpster. Why? They’re not human.





ESPINO:

Did you actually get that feeling from the cops back then?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

Did you get the feeling that you weren’t human in their eyes?





BECERRA:

I had the feeling that they felt I was a stupid, dirty, lazy, greasy Mexican, okay? They’re racist, and that’s why they do that to us. That’s what I felt, and that’s the way they treated us all, okay? That was how I felt and that’s why that issue was so [unclear]. And I think if you grew up thinking that way, you know, that’s your place in society, and a lot of people accept that, and they become, like, ashamed to be Mexicans or they learn to accept that position. Not everybody. But somebody’s got to stand up against it and say no. And sometimes you’ll get your ass kicked for doing it, but that’s what you do. And you’ve got to be either idealistic enough, like Martin Luther King, or you’ve got to be pissed off enough, like Malcolm and Huey Newton and the Brown Berets, where you don’t give a fuck. You’re going to stand up to them anyway.





ESPINO:

Where do you fall between those two?





BECERRA:

I was pissed. I was pissed. Yeah, I was just pissed with all the things that had happened, and so I didn’t care. I didn’t care.





ESPINO:

Did it intensify as the months passed? Like from ’68 to ’70, did that anger intensify? Because for some people it kind of got diffused with certain things that happened, like arrests, murder, or deaths, you know, like Ruben Salazar. Then they become less angry and they retreat more—they become more fearful. Fear replaces anger.



00:54:39

BECERRA:

No. With me, I got angrier and angrier. What happened, for example, in ’72, here in California, there was a law that passed. It was called the Dixon Arnett law and it was passed by the California legislature aimed at anybody who hired illegal aliens. So now we had to defend ourselves for being Mexicans again. Those kinds of issues and police brutality continued and there was always, always one issue after another. The killing of black people, it didn’t stop. It would continue over and over again and that didn’t bother me any less than if they killed a Mexican. They killed that white guy out there in Fullerton. That pisses you off. Beaten to death. Shit.

But what happens now, I think what happened—I read this article by Frank del Olmo in the L.A. Times, and Frank, he was a columnist and he was on the editorial board of the L.A. Times before he died. It’s when he writes that story where he addressed himself to the Chicano militants in East L.A. and he tells them about the story in—that moment in Zoot Suit, where those Chicanos are going to fight and they pull out knives and just start killing each other, and he snaps his finger. Every time he snapped his finger, everything freezes up on the stage, right? So he says, “Orale!” When he snapped his finger, everybody stops. They have switchblades. They want to kill each other. “Orale vato! It’s only a play. You don’t have to kill each other.” [laughs] So Frank del Olmo put that into one of his columns. He said “And that’s why I have to say to the militants in the community.” He says, you know, “Cool it.” He says “Look, time and the numbers are on our side.” So we remember that and it helps you deal with a lot of issues that would ordinarily drive you crazy.





ESPINO:

Is that enough? That’s enough?



00:58:22

BECERRA:

No. You still have to be active. My place was [unclear] my union, okay, around issues in the union, but, no, that’s not enough. You still have to be active, but it helps you to cope with the anger, okay? You asked me how do you cope with that. That’s how you cope with that anger. Otherwise, if you’re really conscious of these issues, it’ll drive you crazy, and so for me, that’s how I have to cope with it, okay? It’s only a matter of time. We’ll deal with it. And it’s also very satisfying to see when Chicanos finally get to kick ass, you know. When Willie Brown makes a deal with Art Torres and Richard Alatorre in the state legislature that they support him for Speaker of the Assembly, that he’ll reciprocate, and they did.

He became the Speaker, the baddest, bad-ass Speaker they’ve ever had, and he makes Richard Alatorre the head of the commission that redistricts all the legislative districts for California for Congress, Senate, and Assembly. Shit. You know, finally we’re going to get people into Sacramento and, of course, that helped us a lot. And then when the Republicans decide they’ve had it with Willie Brown, there’s no way they’re going to unseat him, so they decide to use term limits. So they do their campaign on term limits, and all these whites may get voted out of office, replaced by women and minorities. And they fucked themselves, you know. Every time they attack Mexicans and blacks in California, they screw themselves, you know, and it happens over and over. And I would see stuff like that and I would laugh, you know. I’d tell the white Republicans at work, “You guys just keep shooting yourself in the foot, man. You just keep screwing yourselves.”

And the last presidential campaign, where they tried to see which Republican candidate hated Mexicans the most, right, and they shot themselves in the foot again. Now that’s the only reason that the immigration issue is back, and then, of course, you’ve got Jefferson Beauregard Sessions today leading a charge against immigration reform. But those are things that I also have to see, to help me cope with some of the anger that I’ll still have.





ESPINO:

You were following that redistricting while it was happening?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Was it something that you [unclear]?





BECERRA:

No, I watched it happen. I was laughing, you know. I was watching it happen, yeah.





ESPINO:

That was the eighties, right?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

That was the 1980s. Well, getting back to the walkouts, what do you think the community gained from that, if anything, or do you think it was a failure in the long run, in the end?



01:00:28

BECERRA:

There is no way it was a failure, okay? If you’re going to look at it—well, first of all, look how many Chicano teachers we have there today. That’s the one thing, okay. The other issues, I don’t know, because we did get Chicano Studies into a lot of the high schools. A lot of cultural awareness issues that are in the high schools today, they weren’t there before. There’s a lot that aids the teachers and the students in the classes. Yeah, we still have problems with academic achievement, but not as bad as it was then. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having so many—I mean, today there was a report from Fullerton, because KNX is doing a report on the city of Fullerton, and Cal State Fullerton graduates more Chicanos than any other university in California and number four in the nation. So, I mean, damn. So the schools, you know, they’re doing something right, okay? So, no, it was not a failure.

But more than that, a lot of people see the walkouts as the beginning of the Chicano Movement. I don’t, because I know how things developed, but a lot of them do, and a lot of [unclear] came out, all kinds of organizations in the community, and got the community involved in all kinds of things. So it wasn’t just the high schools, not just the high school issues. I mean, it went to the universities, it went to the community, a lot of the community organizations. It went to the legislators. No, it was a phenomenal, phenomenal success. You can’t just look at it as the dropout rate today compared to then. That’s not the only issue. That’s a very, very narrow view of the student strikes, the student walkouts, because you don’t expect miracles, and don’t think that society still had the fundamental changes that it needs. The changes still have to come, but it was a success, phenomenal success, because you can’t look at it that narrowly. [recorder turned off]





ESPINO:

So you were saying that—





BECERRA:

I think the walkouts were a phenomenal success, and then they were emulated in other parts of California, other states. So, no, I mean, talk about the blossoming of a movement. So, no, they were very, very much a success.





ESPINO:

Were you involved in any of the actions afterwards, like, for example, the sit-in at the Board of Education and demonstrations and those kinds of things?





BECERRA:

Yes. I was not arrested at the Board of Education, but I was there. I was there for the sit-ins. Yeah, I was there, but I didn’t spend as much time as the other people did. I didn’t sleep in. Because people were camped out there, they were sleeping there.





ESPINO:

That’s right.





BECERRA:

Yeah, I didn’t sleep there.





ESPINO:

Were you part of the discussions as to how the group was going to proceed, which direction?





BECERRA:

No, I didn’t take part in that at all. That would have been—I think Joe Razo would have been involved in that—





ESPINO:

Yes.





BECERRA:

—and other people.





ESPINO:

In looking back, do you think that the arrest was—I don’t know if this is the right way to phrase it, but worth it, that you would do it again?





BECERRA:

Okay, which of the arrests? [laughs]





ESPINO:

The first one, the walkouts, relating to the walkouts.





BECERRA:

Okay. Well, I was arrested twice in the walkouts, once at Banning High School and then for the indictments.





ESPINO:

Right, the indictments.





BECERRA:

Yes, of course. They had to be done, you know, they had to be done. I’m glad that after the appellate court threw out the indictments that the district attorney did follow up with the rest of the decision. The appellate court, I couldn’t believe how pissed off they were at us, you know. They said no matter what we did, that we had the right to organize that strike, in spite of how rowdy it got, but that they should proceed with the other charges, the misdemeanor charges against us, because we did interrupt the school. We did interrupt the—you know, all those things that happened. I mean, they had a long list of stuff against us, you know, because a strike is not orderly, and they said they had every right to prosecute us on those other charges, and there was a lot of them. I mean, I didn’t realize it until I read the appellate court decision, which is on the Internet. Yeah, the justices were pissed and they wanted us to be prosecuted, but not for the conspiracy. But do I think it was worth it? Yes, yes.





ESPINO:

Because I was interviewing Vicki Castro and I was surprised to read that she was not arrested, and she makes the joke that they weren’t arresting girls at that time. [laughs] So when you look at all the people that were arrested, does that make sense to you that those individuals played the same—or had the same impact? Do you think that you should have been one of those people who were included in the arrests? I have the names. So there’s Sal Castro; Moctesuma Esparza; Henry Gomez; Fred Lopez; Carlos Montes; Gil, but they have you as Gilberto Cruz Olmeda; Ralph Ramirez; Joe Razo; Eleazar Risco; David Sanchez; and Patricio Sanchez and Richard Vigil.





BECERRA:

Richard Vigil is Mangas Coloradas. Okay, of all those, only Pat Sanchez maybe shouldn’t have been in there.





ESPINO:

Should not have been in there?





BECERRA:

No. He was my father-in-law.





ESPINO:

Oh.





BECERRA:

But he should not have been in there because I don’t think he really took part in any of the planning. Remember the charge was conspiracy, okay, so you have to have—all of those people could have been linked into the planning and the execution of the walkouts. So, yes, those were [unclear]. There were other people involved, of course, that were not indicted.





ESPINO:

Oh, okay.



01:06:21

BECERRA:

But at least those people, yes, those people were involved. I don’t know about Mangas because, see, I didn’t see—like, I know Moctesuma Esparza was involved, but I wasn’t there to see him involved because a lot of people that were involved, I didn’t see them all the time. Most of those people I did see.

Eleazar Risco never went to one of the campuses, okay, but he was the editor of the paper. The meetings were held in the basement of the church where the paper came out of, right? So why didn’t they arrest Father Luce and Father Woods? So there were other people could have been arrested, but they didn’t. But at least these people that they did arrest, they were involved in the planning or execution of the walkouts, but they call it conspiring, where we call it planning, right, because you have to plan.





ESPINO:

So Patricio, Pat, they call him Pat Sanchez or Patricio Sanchez, why do you think he was arrested?



01:07:55

BECERRA:

I have no idea, but, see, Pat had a history in MAPA 40 he was an activist, very much an activist, always involved, and they wanted him anyway as a Communist, okay? So this gave them an excuse to arrest him because he had been involved in a lot of things. He had been involved, for example, in Chavez Ravine, when they were trying to kick those people out, he was among the people that would take food up to the people who were sitting-in that would refuse to leave Chavez Ravine. Even though they were tearing down all the houses, people would still stay there. He was involved in the organizations that were taking food up there to those people. So going back to those days, they wanted him.

He was involved in the Save Hazard Park. Remember, they wanted to get rid of Hazard Park and make it an extension of that hospital they have, that Veterans Hospital in Westwood, and they would have a land swap. The white people over there would get a new park and we would get a hospital for veterans, right, not for the community. And so there was a big fight over that, okay? Pat was involved in that, and the fact that he was—they considered him a Communist. Whether he was or not doesn’t matter. They considered him a Communist, and as it was, he worked very closely with the Communist Party. So that’s why they would go after him. Now they had a chance to get him, so that’s why they went after him.





ESPINO:

It seemed like there were also other Communists, too, like, for example, Mita Cuaron’s parents and the Mounts, Tanya Mount’s parents.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Interesting that they would pick him out.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Did you ever ask him or talk about what—





BECERRA:

No, not at all.





ESPINO:

And then did you follow the proceedings, the trial with—what did you think of Oscar Acosta’s legal skills [Becerra laughs] or his decision to subpoena the judges in the grand jury selection pool?





BECERRA:

I think Oscar had stainless-steel balls. [laughs] He did. No attorney would do that to every—remember the L.A. County Superior Court? He had very much—he also hated racism and he saw them participating in the system of racism, and he wasn’t too keen on the legal system as it was, okay? He thought it was racist, and this was his chance to strike back and that’s what he did. And he had a good basis for that. Some of those admissions he got out of those judges, you know, “Don’t you have any Mexican American friends?” “Well, no, I may know one or two.” He says, “But you know what happens.” This is a white judge telling Oscar on the stand, on the witness stand, “You know what happens. Even in the municipal courts, you appoint a Mexican American, next thing you know, he’s a Spaniard.” [laughs] He says, “He’s a Spaniard. You know what I mean?” I mean, this is a white judge. So these Mexican Americans were the ones we were fighting against, right, as Chicanos in ’68. Those were the very Mexican Americans that we were fighting against, those Spaniards, right, closet Spaniards, we’ll call them. [laughs] So, I mean, who are these Spanish judges trying to shit? They weren’t impressing the white judges. They became a caricature to the white judges.





ESPINO:

Well, what did you think about his style, his presentation? Did you think he was capable, in addition to the other thing that you said about him?





BECERRA:

Yes, he was. You know, there’s different areas of law that people will be able to be very capable and they specialize in them, maybe contract law, maybe family law, whatever, and maybe he wouldn’t have been good at those. I know he would have hated being a corporate lawyer. He wouldn’t have been any good at it. He would have hated it. But this was something that he had a passion for, okay? So, yes, he was going to be very, very good. He was going to dedicate everything to it, to these issues, and so, yeah, besides being bright, he was going to be very good at it.





ESPINO:

You didn’t worry about his—because people talk about his indulgence in narcotics and the fact that he was kind of just unstable. You couldn’t predict how he was going to express himself. He wasn’t even-tempered.





BECERRA:

Okay, that’s true. Okay? That’s true, but, you know, he was a package, okay? And that was him. You cannot expect a reserved, conservative or career-oriented attorney to do what he did, so you take him as is or you don’t. I didn’t have really that much of a problem with him in that regard. He was not my attorney. Neil Herring was my attorney. He was with the National Lawyers Guild. Different people had different attorneys in the conspiracy.





ESPINO:

Why? Why is that?





BECERRA:

I don’t remember. That’s just the way it worked out. Because what happened was that the attorneys came forward offering their services, you know, and to help us out, from the National Lawyers Guild, from the American Civil Liberties Union, and other people. I don’t know where Herman Sillas—what his affiliations were, but he worked on the case too. So to represent us as defendants, you know, different lawyers came, and I told Neil when he offered service, I said yes.





ESPINO:

You guys weren’t like—my husband’s doing this piece, this book on the Chilean miners, the ones that were trapped, and they made a pact. Every decision that they made was going to be made together, and they were going to have one lawyer. You guys didn’t come together as defendants and work as a group in how you were going to present your cases? It was each on an individual—



01:15:22

BECERRA:

Okay, we never got to that point. The issue only came up one time. When we got together, the defendants and our attorneys, and one of the attorneys—his name was Posner, and he thought he was going to try this case like any other criminal case. He didn’t understand that we were Chicano activists. So he represented Carlos Muñoz, okay, and he says, “Look,” he says, “I’m going to defend it my client, and one of the things that we should all agree on and face up to is the fact that there are varying degrees of involvement and of guilt here.” And we said, “Your ass. Your ass. No. We all did this together. We all go down together or we all—we’re going to stick together. We’re not going to be pitting one guy against another.”

And Carlos Muñoz, this was the first he had heard of it, I guess, so he says, “Wait a minute.” He says, “That is not my position at all.” He says, “I know he’s an attorney, speaking as my attorney, but that is not my position. I’m a Chicano like everybody else. That’s it.” So, yeah, we were going to stick together. We decided that early on.





ESPINO:

I don’t know enough about the law to know how it works, but I thought if you’re all indicted together, you all face the proceeds together. Or was it separate or did each one of you had your own lawyer in the same proceedings?





BECERRA:

They’d show up. The attorney would say who he was and who he was representing. But I can’t remember how many lawyers there were. I don’t believe that there was one lawyer for each defendant.





ESPINO:

But you didn’t share your lawyer with anybody else?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

You remember that.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And then you said you were arrested at the same time at Banning.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

What happened with that case?



01:17:27

BECERRA:

I went to court in [unclear], I think, and the party got me an attorney pro bono. We show up to court, and the prosecutor talks to my attorney and tells us, “Look, the docket is all filled up. I don’t know when we’re going to get to your case.” This is on Monday morning. He says, “We might not even get to your case until Friday.” So what an asshole. This is a pro bono attorney. He’s going to give him a week of his practice? No way.

So my attorney explains it to me. I said, “No. We’re going to cop a plea. I’m going to plead no contest.” There’s no way. I mean the man’s already representing me. How am I going to tell him to give up a week of work to represent me on a misdemeanor? This is not a felony. So I pleaded no contest, okay, and I think I got a suspended sentence or—I can’t remember what the hell I got. It’s in my record. I have to check my jacket. I have it now because of the hearing and the Children’s Services thing, so I’ve got several copies in my jacket.





ESPINO:

Oh, wow.





BECERRA:

It’s all in there.





ESPINO:

Oh, fascinating. So they arrested you. What were you doing at the time that they arrested you?





BECERRA:

I was standing on the sidewalk.





ESPINO:

Just standing?





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

You weren’t yelling or—





BECERRA:

No, no.





ESPINO:

What did they say when they approach you and arrest you? How does it play out?





BECERRA:

They didn’t say anything.





ESPINO:

They just grab you?





BECERRA:

Yeah, tell me, “You’re under arrest.” “For what?” “For loitering, loitering around a school. It’s against the law.” [laughs] Well, I was loitering around the school and it is against the law, so there wasn’t too much I could say. [laughs]





ESPINO:

It’s funny. So then—and this can be our last thing that we talk about today and it might take a long time to talk about it, but when did you decide that you wanted to leave the Brown Berets?





BECERRA:

First of all, I stopped going. I stopped going, like, around the time of the indictments. I think it was around the time of the indictments or around the time of the Poor People’s Campaign. I can’t remember. I think it was closer to the time of the indictments. But I just stopped going. I just didn’t go anymore.





ESPINO:

Do you remember why? Do you remember what it was that—were you just busy or—





BECERRA:

No, I was just, like, disillusioned, okay, with the way things were developing. And so then what’s-his-name came by and told me, “Hey, you’re no longer a Brown Beret.” I said, “Fine.” [laughs]





ESPINO:

What’s-his-name? Do you mean David Sanchez?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

Ralph Ramirez?





BECERRA:

No. You know, in every organization you’re going to have new guys that come in. They want to suck up to the leadership, right? And he was one of them. I can’t remember his name. I think his last name was Diaz. Might have been Richard Diaz. So he came in and he told me that, and I said, “Okay.” I had no problem. I was going anyway and I had already stopped participating. So that was it.





ESPINO:

Did they make you turn in your brown beret and your bush—they did?





BECERRA:

Uh-huh, and I [unclear]. So I shouldn’t have done it, but I was so—what happened, I got kind of pissed, you know, and so I did. But I didn’t have to do it. I just did it, just made a clean break with what I was involved in.





ESPINO:

But leading up to that, were there arguments? Were there disagreements?





BECERRA:

No, none, nothing. It’s just David was very, very scared that he was going to lose leadership. And, look, every organization that I’ve been involved in, usually I was one of the founders and usually I was in the leadership, okay? And David Sanchez sensed that. He saw that, okay, the people that gathered around me. And being as paranoid as he was, that’s why he left the Poor People’s Campaign. Yeah, he was going to try and get rid of anybody who maybe presented a threat to his leadership, that he thought—I did not present a threat to his leadership because I didn’t believe in doing something like that. I just felt if I disagree, I just get out, you know. [unclear] organize another organization. That’s what I wanted to do anyway by then, because I thought we had to go in a different direction. But, no, I—





ESPINO:

You didn’t want to take over the leadership of the Brown Berets?





BECERRA:

No, no.





ESPINO:

Did you feel like you would make a better leader than him?





BECERRA:

At the time, yes, absolutely, absolutely. I don’t think there’s any question that the people who came with me also felt that way. There was no question about that. In hindsight, I did the right thing, leaving, not causing any splits in the Brown Berets and not taking the Brown Berets in a different direction, that they went in the direction that David Sanchez wanted them to go, okay? I think that was the right thing to do or at least the better thing to do. With the options available, that was a better thing to do, because, like I said, if we had gone in my direction, people would have gotten killed, just like they did with the Black Panthers. So it’s better that we didn’t go in my direction.





ESPINO:

How did you feel about some of the other members who were close to David? Did you have more of a similar ideology, like, say, for example, with Carlos Montes, who even David himself says was more militant than he was?





BECERRA:

Yeah, Carlos was more militant, okay, but I wasn’t around Carlos enough. So we didn’t have very much interaction, me and Carlos, while we were in the Brown Berets. I didn’t see him very much.





ESPINO:

Why is that?





BECERRA:

I don’t know. I don’t know. I just didn’t see him very much. I know that one of the nights that I was arrested, that he and my sister went out on the street with bottles and stuff, breaking windows and stuff, you know, in retaliation for the arrest. There were other people involved, but I remember that Carlos and my sister—Carlos was a very militant guy. But we didn’t talk enough. Like, for example, he was at the Poor People’s Campaign. I was not, okay, so I didn’t have enough—





ESPINO:

Bonding time?





BECERRA:

Bonding time or any discussion. But even if we had bonded, okay, I’m not sure that Carlos would have left anyway, because remember, regardless whether he was more militant or not, he might have had a different idea of what the Berets were capable of. It wasn’t like he was going to think like I did or like the people that went with me thought. So the fact that he stayed, I want to say that it was good for the organization. I’m sure it was, but at the same time, they got into trouble and not because it was Carlos’ fault, but together they did get into more trouble, like around the Biltmore issues, right? And there are things that I’m sure if we had it to do over again, there are a lot of things we would not do, a lot of things, if you think them through you would not do.





ESPINO:

Like what, for example?





BECERRA:

I would say the Biltmore. You would not allow the cops to maneuver people into something like that, okay? If somebody would have brought that up, you’d expel them from the organization. In ’68, we would not do that, okay? In ’69, we would not do that because that was in line with our way of thinking of maybe taking an action without thinking it through, okay? Suppose worst case, okay, a hotel catches on fire and people are trapped in inside. What would that do to the Chicano Movement? How far would it set it back, especially the militant wing of the Chicano Movement, how many years back? So it’s a good thing it didn’t happen. So years later you think about that, of things that you did without thinking when you were young. And I think about things, you know, that we did. But the thing is that that’s in hindsight, okay, and today you’re not as desperate, because those were very desperate, very tumultuous times. You were swept into something. You were fighting back against an evil, evil, evil thing that was far more evil than anything you were going to do, the Vietnam War, the racism that people [unclear]. None of that came close to the things that we did. So even though today, no, we wouldn’t do it today, but today isn’t 1968 or 1969 anymore.





ESPINO:

You think it’s less evil today than—if you look at society?



01:29:03

BECERRA:

No, I think that what happens is we’re older, okay? Carlos Montes is fighting back today just as much as he was and more today than he was then. He’s involved in a lot of issues, from police brutality to school reform to immigration, a lot of issues that he’s involved in. He hasn’t slowed down, but he’s not doing things the way he did them then. We change. The world changes. We change, and you think things through more today than you did then. So, yeah, things, in some ways, are a lot—Jesus, just yesterday and today—we used to be worried about being infiltrated by the cops. Look what they just disclosed yesterday.

The government is listening to every single recording, every single conversation that takes place in the U.S., every text message, right, that’s sent, everything by phone and on the Internet, all your emails, everything. There’s no Fourth Amendment protection for that? I mean, it’s insane, you know, and I mean that’s a lot worse than it was then. Guantanamo, no habeas corpus for prisoners, you know, killing Americans with no charges being pressed against them. Yeah, a lot of things. The police brutality still happens, you know. Maybe it’s not as brutal today in the LAPD as it was in the past by any means, but it still happens. The racism today is focused a lot on undocumented people, people with no papers, and they catch the brunt of it right now, dying by the thousands in the desert trying to come across, the racism that can be so overt against Mexicans, not all Mexicans, and it’s only against illegal aliens, right?

I used to have those kind of arguments with people, you know, Republicans at work. I said, “Who are you trying to bullshit? Why don’t they have drones flying over the Canadian border?” It’s us, you know. So, no, the racism is even stronger when candidates for national office use Mexicans as a piñata, right, the racist attacks on us, you know. Yeah, that’s a lot worse. And they pay for it and now they’ve got to kiss our ass, you know, try to go through immigration reform and everything. One time David Sanchez couldn’t believe how well things had gone for us. He shook his head. He says, “I think Reies Tijerina is right. Maybe God is on our side.” [laughs] And sometimes, you know, you think about that. Like today I’m going to take flowers to my mom and dad for what happened in court yesterday. So, yeah, some things have gotten worse. But the thing, too, is that today we’re so organized all across the country and fighting those things, but we don’t have a Chicano Movement like we had before. That’s true, but that has to stop people from fighting back.





ESPINO:

Right. In different ways.





BECERRA:

Different ways, yes.





ESPINO:

That’s right. Well, when you think about that time and you look at the Brown Beret symbolism and the—well, the fact that people were carrying arms, the Brown Berets were practicing—I don’t know if you were a part of the target practice up in the mountains, the hills. Did you feel like you were at a war?





BECERRA:

Yes. Not only were we at war, but we were preparing for war. If the war wasn’t here, we were preparing for it. Yes, very much.





ESPINO:

You didn’t feel like it was a—if you think about the terminology and your position as a Brown Beret, was it a position of self-defense or was it a position of revolutionary change?





BECERRA:

It was both. It was almost like our response to racism and to us. Revolutionary change, the way we looked at it then, was not a Socialist revolution.





ESPINO:

By any means necessary, is what I’m referring to.





BECERRA:

Oh, yeah, that was very much a part of what we believed in, very much, and it was not just self-defense. It was self-defense maybe at the program, but the practicality was that we were preparing for—well, we hopefully, after organizing, would be an armed insurrection for Chicanos to have freedom, our own Aztlán. That’s what we were fighting for and we knew it. We knew that’s what we were fighting for. There was no ambiguity at all.





ESPINO:

Everyone was on the same page?



01:32:56

BECERRA:

Everybody knew that we were fighting for a free Aztlán. Everybody knew, and it was stated in different ways. Some would say we’re going to drive the white man out of here, you know. That was one way of stating it. When we drive the white man out of here, they weren’t going to rule. Southwest will be ours again, and we’ll rule the Southwest.

So it wasn’t a question like when we had a position on the Chicano [unclear]. It wasn’t like that. It was just to liberate Aztlán. And remember, two years later, in ’70, the slogans that people would raise would be—like, in the Chicano Moratorium would be, like, Vietnam, Aztlán, same battle, two fronts. And so people were very clear that there was a question that we were liberating Aztlán. That was clear to everybody. That’s what we were doing or were trying to do. That’s why the question of going to [unclear], that was not to defend ourselves from the pigs, even though that might be what was in people’s minds. We thought that it would become necessary one day that [unclear] defend ourselves with the police, but basically the most basic thing was to fight for the liberation of Aztlán. That was it. Certainly the people I talked with knew about it in the Brown Berets. That was our view, insurrection for the liberation of Aztlán.





ESPINO:

So when you left the Brown Berets, did you take that ideology with you?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes.





ESPINO:

And what happened? What did you plan next?





BECERRA:

First it was La Junta, but it never developed to that point until that was in ATM, and that’s when we decided we had to develop that position on Chicano national question. And when we formed the larger ATM, that’s when we decided to study the position and go over the position on the Chicano national question. So the issue of self-determination, that’s never changed. For me it’s never changed. The fact that it’s not on the front burner at any given point, that’s the way a movement is. Different issues come to the fore at different times. They may never come to the fore again, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to self-determination. I would like for us to never have to deal with the issue of secession because I don’t look forward to that, but it’s still our right.





ESPINO:

In La Junta, were you alone in founding that or—





BECERRA:

No. No, it was Johnny Parsons, Tacos, Little John. Who else? Little John. I can’t remember.





ESPINO:

It was all men?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Why was that?





BECERRA:

Because that’s what we gravitate to. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Because at that time, wasn’t Gloria Arellanes—didn’t she have a leadership role in the Brown Berets?





BECERRA:

Not then.





ESPINO:

She didn’t have one yet in—I thought from the beginning she had a leadership role, like in ’69, she had a leadership role.





BECERRA:

Sure, but in ’69 I wasn’t in the Brown Berets. Remember, this was in June—





ESPINO:

Oh, ’68, right. You told me that. Okay, so were there even women when you were in the Brown Berets? Were there even women in the Brown Berets at that time?





BECERRA:

Right from the beginning there were women that were there and that participated with us. My sister was one of them. Lizzy was another one. Diane Robertson was there. She had a problem because she was a Maoist, but she was there. Even if they gave her a bunch of shit, she was there. They didn’t give her shit because she was a woman; they gave her shit because she was a Communist, okay? And David was very paranoid about communism, you know. I think Fred Lopez may have been also, and some of us were not.





ESPINO:

Well, what was your position as far as the women’s role in the organization? Did you have one?





BECERRA:

No, because there were no women around. And the ones that—





ESPINO:

Well, you just mentioned three of them.



01:38:22

BECERRA:

Yes, but the thing is that when I was there, we just barely started to get structured, okay? A woman’s role to me was if we’re going to go to an action, she comes as a comrade to do the action, just like any guerillera, okay? Period, and that’s it. Whatever we’re going to do, she’s going to do, too, right along with us.

As far as, like, you’re saying a role in leadership, at that point there was really—there’s two types of leadership, okay? One was David, who was, like, structurally the leader. The other type of leadership is the one by influence, okay, and I was that type of a leader. So if you ask women in leadership, where, which of those two, okay? Because you have to put it into some kind of—by ’69, you can put into a context, but not in May and June of ’68, no. There’s no context to put that into.





ESPINO:

Well, when you look at society as a whole and you look at expectations for women, even, I think, you still could not wear pants. Basically, women wore skirts to work and to school, and those kinds of rules were in effect. How did that play out into the organization? Were you trying to transform—I mean, was self-determination just a part of the way you looked at the structure of society or were you trying to transform those kinds of relationship as well, male-female relationships, and having different expectations for—





BECERRA:

That wouldn’t happen till a few years later in ATM. Yeah, that wouldn’t happen until ATM.





ESPINO:

Because sometimes I look at the photographs of the women, and the women look very powerful but they also look like ornaments. Not ornaments. What is the word? Like jewelry or like the accent to the men versus—





BECERRA:

They were like tokens. Tokenism?





ESPINO:

Something like that, but like a pretty woman on a man’s arm. She’s like an ornament. She’s like an accessory, not always somebody who’s there because of her intelligence and her strength and her knowledge, etc. I don’t know if I’m making sense, but—





BECERRA:

Yeah, but in ’68 in the Brown Berets, that never presented itself. It won’t be till years later that would present itself. It happened in La Raza Unida Party and then it happened in ATM. I’m talking La Raza Unida Party, California, not Texas. California La Raza Unida Party.





ESPINO:

You mean as far as women asking for leadership, that kind of thing?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Okay. I think I’m going to stop it now.





BECERRA:

Okay. [recorder turned off]





ESPINO:

Okay. You had a story that you remembered. You want to tell me?





BECERRA:

This happened the last time I talked with you, two weeks ago, and we talked about Gloria and her indigenous mother and her attitude towards the Chicano Nation and Chicano National Movement, right?





ESPINO:

The concept of Aztlán.





BECERRA:

Yes, the concept of Aztlán, okay, which, by the way, is an indigenous concept, okay? [laughs] And then I told you that, to me, these issues were political issues that had to be looked at politically, not as a form of religion or as a form of real estate of who was here first, okay?





ESPINO:

That’s right.



01:44:0401:45:2701:46:55

BECERRA:

Because, you know, if the issue is who was here first, it becomes like two children fighting over a toy, “I had it first.” “No, I had it first.” No, no, no, no, that’s not the question. Okay. That day after I talked with you, I got a call from a brother who’s also involved in the indigenous movement, and he’s going to Ghost Mountain or something up in the Four Corners area. There’s going to be a demonstration over there against Peabody Coal. Peabody Coal has been digging over there. They found a lot of artifacts and a lot of bones of Navajos because that’s on the Navajo Reservation. And so they’re going to have a demonstration demanding those artifacts be given to the university. There’s, like, 100 million artifacts, he told me, something like that, or 100,000, 100,000 artifacts, so he wanted me to help in support of that.

So I said, “Okay.” I told him, “Look. What’s the issue, just the bones and the artifacts?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, look. Tell me what the point is. Because every time I turn around, indigenous movement is going to lay claim to some bones somewhere, a sacred burial site. And that’s all you do, go from burial site to burial site. And I don’t know if you have any kind of a political agenda that this is a part of, because you can make a whole career out of going from burial site to burial site.” “No, you don’t understand. The elders have asked us to do this.”

I said, “Okay, well, then the elders probably have a plan, some kind of a plan, a program that they’re implementing, and this is a part of it. Do you know what that is?” “No, they just asked us—.” I said, “Brother, you can’t do this. You can’t ask people to just take part in going from burial site to burial site and spend the rest of their lives like that and get nowhere. That’s called religion, you understand?” “No, I just want you guys to give us some support, anybody you know.” I said, “I know people, but I’ve got to tell them something, you know, there’s this program that you’re involved in, and this is part of the program, the demands you have, etc., not just that you’re going from burial site to burial—.”

“Well, we want those artifacts back.” I said, “Okay. Look. First of all, Peabody can’t go in there and dig for coal on a reservation unless they have permission from the Navajo government, so I think that would be your first issue, would be dealing with the Navajo government, who are the representatives, who is the jurisdictional president for that area. I know Peter MacDonald was the president of the Navajo Nation for many years, but there may be different jurisdictions, and that’s who you have to go up against. If you don’t like what they did, change the leadership. You have a political issue right there. Change the leadership so they don’t give these things away.”

“Well, no, we know the history of—they set up different groups to fight against each other, the Navajo Nation.” I said, “Okay, that’s your issue. That’s what you should be dealing with as well.” “No, but, you know, they’re a bunch of sellouts.” “That’s why you should deal with that issue.” So then that same day I’m watching the news, and there’s a big demonstration against Peabody Coal in West Virginia. Why? Because Peabody Coal bought another coal company, and the only purpose for buying it was so they could declare bankruptcy, get rid of the pension plan, okay, which was a liability, get rid of the contract, the union contract, or renegotiate it, and now they would have a very valuable asset that they could work or sell. But first you buy it to declare bankruptcy, to get rid of the pension plan.

So I called him back. “Hey, you’ve got allies. They’ve got other people demonstrating against Peabody. Hook up with those union workers, United Mine Workers over here in West Virginia. I mean, this is great.” “No, we’re not doing that. We’re going to go—.” I said, “Wait a minute. That’s not how you work politically. You understand? You’ve got allies. You guys can make a hell of a statement hooking with them.” “No. We’ve got our plans made. We’re going to go meet with the elders and we’re—.” I said, “What the fuck? What the fuck? You’re acting like kids. What the fuck are you doing?”

But that’s what I was dealing with the other time that I talked to you about when people don’t deal with a serious issue politically. And it may be, you know, people in the indigenous movement are not looking at this as an issue of the Great Spirit, our values, our ancient values, which is religion, or sweat lodges and burial sites. When my daughter went to study in Ireland and she was very close to the IRA, I said—because I always have to do this when my daughter’s—whatever her interests are intellectually, boom, I jump on it.

So I went and researched the Easter Rebellion of 1916, and that’s when I first read about James Connolly. James Connolly was one of the martyrs of the Easter Rebellion who was hanged by the British for his role as a leader of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland. I read his writings. He was a Socialist. And I loved his writings. As a Nationalist, he was an Irish Nationalist and a Socialist. One of the things he says, “There’s been a revitalization, a rebirth of Irish culture,” he says. And he talked about the language, the music, the literature, all these. He says, “But we have to be careful that we understand these things and—.”

Session Five (July 8, 2013)





ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is July 8th. I’m interviewing Cruz Becerra at his home in Commerce, California. I wanted to start today with a look back at the Brown Berets. We talked about your role a bit last time we met, and I was wondering if you could tell me—you talked about some of the reasons why you left the organization, but your role during the time that you were in the Brown Berets, what do you think the biggest successes of the organization were while you were there? I’m thinking it was about two years that you were actually—





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

A year?





BECERRA:

Less than a year.





ESPINO:

Less than a year you were an official Brown—so you were with the Young Chicanos.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And then—





BECERRA:

Brown Berets.





ESPINO:

And the time encompasses less than a year?



0:01:250:03:280:04:43

BECERRA:

Yes. Yes, it’s less than a year. I think there was a number of things that—the significance of the Berets was that we were at—the movement as a movement did not exist, not as a movement that identified itself as a movement. And there were people doing work in different areas, but where the students or labor, community organizations, educational organizations, social workers, organizations, but as a movement, it didn’t exist yet.

What happened with the Berets is that—there’s two things. One is that first there had to be a break made with the traditional politics of Chicanos, of tailing after the liberals and the Democratic Party and of being very traditional, politically traditional. That break had to be made. Otherwise, Chicanos would always be at the mercy of white liberals, and that’s what we wanted to break away from to be independent, to have an independent political movement, at least independent of the white liberals, because that’s who we had to go running to every time we had a problem, liberals who patted you on the head and went about their business. They’re also the ones that would stab you in the back. I thought, you know, maybe things had changed, but they haven’t changed at all.

I go on MSNBC and you see these liberals on there and they talk about how progressive they are, and some of them, they’re quite good, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, but the other ones are quite Democratic Party hacks and they will defend Barack Obama against Snowden. They’ll talk about he’s siding with the enemies of our country, and I don’t know how Bolivia or Venezuela or Ecuador are enemies, you know. They’re not enemies. It’s just that they criticize imperialism, they criticize the historical relationship between the U.S. and Latin America, and if you stand up to the giant, you’re an enemy. So they’re still liberals and if they’re liberals on international issues like that, they’ll stab you in the back. They’ll stab us in the back here, too, and it’s harder for them to get away with it here because now they’re depending more and more on Latinos and the Latino vote.

Also there’s a pretty strong coalition politics of blacks and browns, Asians, gays and lesbians, women, youth, so that kind of coalition is pretty strong, and so it’s kind of hard to just to zero in on us, but they will. They’ll do it on immigration issues. They’ll say, "We had no choice. We had to give in on this issue, give in on that just so we can get something through." But from what I understand, that immigration bill is really—it’s really bad, you know. I mean, it’s really bad. Who’s going to be able to come in? Maybe you’ll never have citizenship. We’ll have to go nineteen years before you have a Green Card. I mean, it’s really bad. So you always have to still watch out for the liberals. So at that time, that’s what we saw, and that hasn’t changed. So we had to have a new type of politics, independent. And one of the ways we had to do that was really to go against the white power structure, what we called the white power structure. So we had to launch that organization and then influence as much of youth as we could in that direction, and we succeeded.

We weren’t alone. The students at the universities were doing the same thing, the very same thing. We just weren’t doing it together, but they were doing the same thing. Of course, in the Student Movement there was a split. There was still a split between those who wanted to go tradition, because, remember, these are going to be the professionals, the future professionals, and so there was some who wanted to go in an independent militant direction and others who wanted to go the more traditional, and they were split just about in half. But within a few months, that changed, changed dramatically. But at the time, there was still a split in the Student Movement as to which direction to go, a more or less conservative—they weren’t real conservatives, but you would call them more conservative, more conservatives than the more radical militant Chicanos, the more nationalist Chicanos and UMAS and MEChA. Not MEChA. UMAS and MASA.





ESPINO:

MASA.





BECERRA:

So those are people who wanted influence as well. So the direction of independent, move independently of the Democratic Party, it wasn’t 100 percent, okay, because we still would work to some degree or another with some of the Chicano Democrats. Because I remember Calderon was running for mayor or for Congress or something or another, and he asked the Brown Berets for help, and we did, we helped him. It wasn’t the voter registration, okay? It was other ways we helped him, but he got our assistance, okay?





ESPINO:

Well, Vicki Castro has a picture where it’s, I believe, David Sanchez, herself behind a poster that says "Nava for Board of Education."





BECERRA:

Board of Education.





ESPINO:

So that must have been in ’68.





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

Sixty-seven?





BECERRA:

No, it would not have been—’67, maybe, but no earlier than that, because in ’68, Nava would not be running.





ESPINO:

He ran right before the walkout. He won right before the walkouts.





BECERRA:

Yes, that would have been before. That was ’67 or else March of—but I think it would be—because there would have been a big backlash against Nava if it was after the walkouts.





ESPINO:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was in ’67 that that happened. Okay, so you’re saying that in ’68, if you were only with the Brown Berets for less than a year, it would be from ’68 to ’69?





BECERRA:

No, ’67 to ’68.





ESPINO:

Sixty-seven to ’68.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Yeah, and then the walkouts were in March.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

You’re still with the Brown Berets at that time.





BECERRA:

Yes, and the indictments came down in June, and I was still with the Berets.





ESPINO:

Wow. That’s early.





BECERRA:

[laughs] It didn’t take too much time. What happened, we just had to strike out in a militant direction. Oh, my god, it was radical—





ESPINO:

Wow, yeah.





BECERRA:

—quickly.





ESPINO:

Okay, I want to talk about that, like your shift and the political ideology that you were developing. I’m assuming that’s part of the reason you left the Brown Berets, from our conversation and some of the things that I’ve read, the class analysis that you had. But going back to what you said about the white power structure, how did you define it back then? Because you mentioned—would white liberals be part of the white power structure?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes, yes, everything—and then in those days, I mean, everything was really, really black or white, you know. It was a real, real dichotomy there because we hardly had any representation at all politically, so it wasn’t—when you’re talking about the white power structure, it really was there. It wasn’t some mystical thing. It was there and you saw it every day. Whether it was in the form of the police or the form of the politicians, whether it was the mayor or the City Council, it was there and you saw it. And, of course, then you had Vietnam and you saw Vietnam as a racist war, which it was, very much so. I mean, I’d come out of the navy and, you know— [interruption]





ESPINO:

Okay, we’re back. We were talking about—you were describing the white establishment and differentiating between—not really differentiating, but you were saying that white liberals were included in that and you were talking about how it’s not like today, where everything—I mean, it was just—like, it wasn’t a fantasy. Like Aztlán was this concept, this romantic concept, but the white power structure was a real, tangible thing.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And I don’t know if you want to elaborate on that, but there’s one—I mean, the interesting thing for me in doing these interviews is finding out how many white and Jewish people were involved in the Chicano Movement. Like, for example, Rona Fields, as far as helping the Brown Berets with some of their endeavors. Did you have a chance to meet her at all? What was your impression of her? Would you consider her a white liberal or would you put her in a different kind of category?



0:11:24

BECERRA:

No, I would say she was a white liberal, definitely, and I didn’t see her helping so much, okay. I saw her mostly studying us more than helping us, okay. And there were a lot of people like that coming to study us more than really help us. Now, that was my personal encountering her, both at La Piranya and at her house. She lived up in Altadena. How much she helped, I don’t know. Different people have different ideas today. Eagle doesn’t find her too helpful, but I don’t know.

There were people who you would call white liberals who were around who were helpful to one degree, were very supportive, but they weren’t liberals. They were [unclear]. They were like Socialists. I mean, one guy, in fact, he’s still a friend of mine. He called me last week from Guadalajara. He lives in Guadalajara now. He’s Jewish. He grew up Monterey Park and Mark Keppel High School, speaks Spanish, a really, really a good guy. I thought he was, like, a Trotskyist, and he said he wasn’t a Trotskyist. He just liked Trotsky more than he liked Stalin. But a very, very good man, very principled guy. When they had the clinic, the Brown Berets had the clinic, he was there and the reason he was helpful is that David Sanchez didn’t speak Spanish, okay. I don’t think he still speaks Spanish. And so people would come there for help and he would translate. The people would come and speak in Spanish. David didn’t speak Spanish, so he would serve as a translator for David so he could communicate with the Chicanos in the community, right? And my friend tells me, "Imagine that, a gringo asking for a leader in the Brown Berets." He said, "It’s crazy." But, yeah, but he was supportive. He was around.





ESPINO:

What was his name again?





BECERRA:

Bob Briggs. Bob Briggs, yes, and he hung around with another guy named Levi Kingston, okay, an African American brother who’s still doing work here, hired by M_____. Right adjacent to us, he’d have, a children’s, I think, a preschool kind of place, and he still works there, but they may be getting their funding cut now. They’re still on a day-to-day all the time because of the state cuts in funding. And then apart from that, I can’t remember anybody at that time.





ESPINO:

Did you have interactions with Ruth Robinson from La Raza newspaper?





BECERRA:

Oh, yes. Yeah. Ah, she was one of us. I mean, I don’t consider her like a white liberal, you know, now. She’s a sister. You know, she was one of our sisters, and I would not consider her a white liberal at all. You’ve got to make those kinds of distinctions, okay.





ESPINO:

Yeah, those distinctions are important because, like, they lumped everybody within the Chicano Movement as this one thing. Well, not so much anymore. I mean, now we’re starting to understand it as more people study it, but to lump all white folks in one category, you know, as the power structure, as white liberals, as—but how would you—I mean, you say she’s a sister, but was that rare to find somebody like that or was that common?



0:14:38

BECERRA:

I don’t know how rare it was because in the nationalist movement, the national movement, I didn’t have as much contact. Generally, the whites would go towards the centers of activity, okay, whether it was La Raza magazine, the Brown Berets, things like that.

After La Junta, I wasn’t involved really in anything until we started the Labor Committee. In the Labor Committee, the whites who come around are not liberals; they’re Communists. They’re Marxists-Leninists, you know, so they’re not white liberals anymore. I mean, they are committed revolutionaries, so it’s totally different than it was in the Chicano Movement, where there you didn’t make a distinction between white liberals and committed people who were really committed to the movement, committed to the revolution, and that’s what I saw Ruth. I mean, she was a committed person. She wasn’t a liberal, a white liberal at all.





ESPINO:

What about Father Luce and Father Wood, those individuals from the church?





BECERRA:

It’s hard to categorize them because these people were really committed. I mean, this was their life, you know, and so you can’t say they were white liberals. Maybe they were liberals in terms of their ideology, you know, the kinds of changes they wanted to make within the system. Whether they were real revolutionaries and all that, that really wasn’t important to me. What was important was that they were committed, they were committed to a struggle, and in that regard they were not liberals. I mean, they were there for the long haul and they were there, committed. I was surprised that they weren’t indicted along with us, you know, except I think the district attorney was trying to isolate us from the rest of the community, not [unclear] with the rest of the community.

It would have been a big mistake. Especially when we were indicted and we were there for our bail hearing at the arraignment, and they do the bail hearing, and the archbishop for Los Angeles, the Episcopal archbishop, asked the court to release us into his care [unclear] recognizant into his custody. No bail. [laughs] So these people that Father Luce were, you know—he was something else. He was a really, really good guy. He was a committed man, really, really committed. You don’t call him a liberal. I don’t know what his ideology was. I just know what his commitment was, and that’s what mattered, you know.





ESPINO:

So you look at these individuals as—you understand them based on their work, based on their actions.





BECERRA:

Yes, their commitment.





ESPINO:

What about the power distribution? Because some people say that even leftists, even people who are Communists, who are Socialists, who are committed to a revolution, try to come in and take over different movement organizations, whether it be within the black community or the Chicano community. Did you experience that kind of a—like somebody like Ruth or Father Luce, did they insert their power? Did they try to take leadership, or did they take leadership and people basically did what they were asking of them?





BECERRA:

No, Father Luce never did that. Ruth never did that. Father Luce, he helped to develop the conditions for leadership to develop in the Young Chicano Movement. He encouraged, he would have talks with people, and he never would tell you what to do. He’d make some suggestions, you know. Once in a while he would give you ideas, but, no, he didn’t try to take over leadership. He helped create the conditions for the development of a movement, you know, plant the seeds and do everything that he could for the development of a movement that he believed in. So I didn’t see that from him. No, those people would not be in that—I did see—are you talking about white people coming into Left organizations or white people coming into the Chicano Movement to try and influence it in that way?





ESPINO:

Yeah, Chicano Movement. Some people have said that about, well, even the Chicano Moratorium, that there were individuals who were going to use that as a reason to, well, start the revolution, in their eyes. They thought that—I mean, they really believed that a revolution was imminent and that these were some of the organizations that were going to help make that happen.





BECERRA:

Okay, I don’t know about the Moratorium Committee because I never worked with the Moratorium Committee. I was in La Raza Unida Party, and when we would have our county or even the state caucuses, the Socialist Workers Party would come in and they would, like, set up their tables. They’d want to pass out their literature, sell their newspaper. Even though we were the Labor Committee and, for the most part, we were all Marxists-Leninists, what we resented about the Socialist Workers Party was two things. One is they would not get into the trenches with you. They would not be anywhere near where the action was, right? They just wanted to come in like missionaries, right, and try to convince people that they had the truth, right? And we resented that.

The second thing was that, for the most part, they were white, and we didn’t like white missionaries coming in, you know, any more than the Mau Mau did in Africa or anyplace else. We resented that, so we would chase them off. I mean, sometimes [unclear], get them away because we didn’t want them, first—you know, it was a Chicano thing, and the La Raza Party had to stay a Chicano thing, okay, even though when we identified who La Raza was, it wasn’t just Chicanos, okay. We talked about people from the Caribbean, from Latin America, from the Antilles, Filipinos. For us, La Raza was very broad, but we had to recognize that it had to stay Raza. We couldn’t have white organizations coming in, whether left-wing, Communists, or whatever.

But these people from the Socialist Workers Party we particularly disliked because, first of all, they were Trotskyists and we were Stalinists, okay, first thing. Second thing is that we didn’t like the idea of missionaries coming in, and that’s what these people were doing. If they had been people—[unclear] suppose it had been the Black Workers Congress who came in and set up. We’d welcome them, you know, because we knew that they had a history of struggle that we knew, and it was very close to us. But that’s not what happened here. So, yeah, that’s the only time that I saw that. They never got into the organization where they could have influence.





ESPINO:

What about with the Brown Berets? They weren’t trying to, well, sit-in and collaborate and influence. I’m assuming—considering David, you have mentioned that David was anti-Communist, I’m assuming he was anti-class politics.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

I’m just assuming that. I don’t know for sure. He talks about not really having that—that wasn’t his goal, like a workers’ revolution. But I’m assuming that during that time there were leftist groups who wanted to educate David and turn the Brown Berets into an arm for that kind of change.





BECERRA:

I saw some of them come around to—I mean, Diane Robertson was one, and even though her last name is Robertson, she’s a Latina. And she came around and she tried to do that, but not as an organization; as an individual. She tried to do that out of—how do you say it—not as a white liberal, missionary-type person. No, as a revolutionary, and she saw revolutionary organization and she wanted to influence it, and I didn’t see anything wrong with it. She was Raza, first of all, and I didn’t see anything wrong with that, you know. But some people may have seen her as white, you know, but it doesn’t matter.

She was still Raza and she still was doing the right thing. Whether you agree with her or disagree with her, she was doing the right thing. There were other people would come in and were opportunists, were not Left. They were like leaders of community organizations, white, who would come in and they would want to work with us on conflict-resolutions issues, right? "What the fuck are you talking about?" Stuff like that, so, you know, we’d chase them away. All of us would chase them away. David did not want anybody influencing the Brown Berets other than him. That was it, so that was not going to happen.





ESPINO:

I asked you a few sessions back if you had seen the Brown Book. You said you had never seen it.





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

And I don’t know if you’re interested in seeing it now, but I have a photocopy of it. It says it was written in 1968 and it just talks about David’s plan for the organization.





BECERRA:

Okay. We were both in jail at the same time on the same case. We both got sent to Wayside. We were young, okay? David was younger than I was, and they had him working in the bakery at Wayside. He told me one of his jobs with this—he’s telling me this while we’re there in jail, and he tells me he got this loaf of bread and he runs it through the slicer, right? And he said he was thinking of getting a pipe or something in this loaf of bread and running it through and just destroying all the blades. I thought, "What the fuck for?" [laughs] And then we got separated. What happened, I got the flu while I was there, so they sent me back to the county, to the new county, because that’s where they had medical facilities and I was going to get everybody else sick. And then I was there. Then from there, after I was okay, they sent me to Mount Wilson, the camp at Mount Wilson, so I was only with David for a few days at Wayside and then I caught the flu. I got shipped out of there. But, yeah, I was in jail, I guess, when he wrote this.





ESPINO:

He said for some reason they kept him in solitary confinement, and that’s when he started to write that.





BECERRA:

Okay. I don’t know about solitary confinement. I wasn’t there all the time. I was just there for a few days, and during those few days, he was working in the bakery, so he was with everybody else. What happened to him afterwards, if he started saying stuff, you know, which he would have done, you know, then they might isolate him just to not have any trouble. They don’t want to have any troublemakers in there.





ESPINO:

Oh, you mean like talking back?





BECERRA:

No, talking to other prisoners, talking to other inmates, you know, and trying to—





ESPINO:

Politicize?





BECERRA:

Yeah, politicize, create trouble, okay? They don’t want any riots in there. [unclear] understand us. I mean, we’re in there for inciting a riot anyway as it is, right, so they put us in a maximum security. Wayside Max was where we were, Wayside Max. And [unclear] might have done that for that reason after he’d been there a few days. But, no, I didn’t—





ESPINO:

You never read that?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

I just imagined, after talking to him and few other people, that all the Brown Berets were carrying that around in their pocket, like the Little Red Book. It wasn’t like that?





BECERRA:

This happened after I wasn’t in the Berets anymore.





ESPINO:

That was after—that soon?





BECERRA:

Yeah, because he wasn’t at Wayside—no. February of ’68, we had just been arrested. We hadn’t even gone to court yet.





ESPINO:

Yeah, and it wasn’t even the walkouts yet—





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

—because March ’68 were the walkouts.





BECERRA:

Yeah. This was not February. We were in jail in—we spent Thanksgiving in jail.





ESPINO:

Of ’67?





BECERRA:

Of ’68.





ESPINO:

After the walkouts?





BECERRA:

After the walkouts.





ESPINO:

So it’s impossible that he wrote that in February of ’68.





BECERRA:

Yeah, yeah. No.





ESPINO:

Okay. So then you were no longer in the Brown Berets, so you never saw that document?





BECERRA:

No, and as far as, like, if there’s a conflict in dates, I can resolve that real easy because I have my rap sheet, and it tells you when I was arrested, okay. Because when I was arrested, you know, we’re arrested and we went to East L.A. court, talked to Vega, Judge Vega. He was pissed off at us and he gave us the maximum. First offense, maximum.





ESPINO:

And can you tell me why you were arrested?





BECERRA:

Yeah, we were on Whittier Boulevard and—





ESPINO:

What were you doing there?





BECERRA:

Causing trouble, almost like inciting a—really inciting a riot, okay? And the cops came and they chased everybody. They caught me and David. They cornered us, and the other people got away. The night they took us away, my sister was there. My sister was in the Berets. This is February of ’68, and her and Carlos Montes went out that night throwing—well, just, you know, vandalizing, okay, breaking windows, throwing—I don’t know if it was Molotov cocktails or bottles or one thing, but they went out that night, like revenge for arresting us.





ESPINO:

Can you back up to the beginning and talk about how you decided to come together that night on Whittier Boulevard and what was the goal and what was the—like, did you all meet and—





BECERRA:

No, we went—





ESPINO:

What was the plan?





BECERRA:

We would say that, you know, "Let go out on Whittier Boulevard," right, and we were going to be—well, we were passing out flyers. I think we were passing out flyers for Piranya Coffeehouse, and it was, like, agitational material, okay. It was agitational material, and we’re passing it out to the people that are cruising the boulevard, okay. And the cops came to stop us, and that’s when that happened.





ESPINO:

When what happened?





BECERRA:

That they arrested us and took us in.





ESPINO:

Just like that?





BECERRA:

Just like that. They never needed a reason, because we were dressed like Brown Berets, okay. They don’t need a reason, okay, and since when we were getting arrested, we were, like, causing a ruckus, you know, and it’s like inciting other people to riot, right?





ESPINO:

Okay, so then there was a reason.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And what exactly were you doing? Because the story that I’ve heard is that David was on a soapbox, like he actually got on a box. Do you remember what he was saying?





BECERRA:

No, no, but the idea—that doesn’t matter whether he was on an actual soapbox or not. That’s what we were doing. We were agitating, okay? We were agitating, passing out flyers. So if he was on a soapbox, whether he was actually on the soapbox or not—





ESPINO:

On something, or he elevated himself.





BECERRA:

Yeah, that’s fine, and that might be exactly what happened because I remember we used to go out and do stuff like that. So that might be exactly what happened.





ESPINO:

Do you remember what the message was?





BECERRA:

Yeah, it was against—yes, it wasn’t complicated. [laughs] It was going to be for brown power against the white power structure, our land, and the pigs. So that would have been real short, to the point, okay? We called on people at the coffeehouse to join the Brown Berets and take on the struggle.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

It wasn’t going to be too complicated at all.





ESPINO:

Yeah. Did people come around and—





BECERRA:

Well, yeah, they would.





ESPINO:

Were people afraid or did people heckle you guys?





BECERRA:

Nobody heckled us at all, not at all. They wanted to know what was going on and people were very, very—kids were very supportive, very, very supportive, saying stuff like, "Yeah, it’s about time," you know, and stuff like that, very supportive. No, we were not heckled. I don’t remember anybody, any young people heckling us out there on the boulevard at all.





ESPINO:

So what was the agitation? I mean, did you guys start throwing stuff and that’s when the cops came in?





BECERRA:

No. When the cops came, they wanted us to stop what we were doing, first of all, okay. Remember, if we were in La Piranya Coffeehouse where we were supposed to be, they would pull us out and line us up against the wall, you know, start taking notes who was there, your name, you know, so they’d have a list of who was there, and so it didn’t matter what you were doing. If you were driving a car and they saw you, they’d pull you over. It didn’t matter. They didn’t have to have an excuse. Long as you were Brown Beret, that’s all the excuse they needed. That’s all they needed, nothing else. And so when they saw us out on the boulevard, they get pissed, you know, and they would see what we were doing, passing out these flyers. They’d get pissed, you know, and they would arrest us. They could have [unclear]. No, they arrested us. They could have told us to stop. The other thing, too, they chased us, okay? That’s the other thing that pissed them off.





ESPINO:

Because you ran. You guys ran?





BECERRA:

Yeah. Yeah, and so they got pissed off about that too.





ESPINO:

And they just caught you and David?





BECERRA:

Yes, that was it.





ESPINO:

Did you have any idea how you were—that was the first time you got arrested?





BECERRA:

Yeah, for being in the Brown Berets, yes, I think so.





ESPINO:

Did you have any idea how you were going to respond? Did you guys talk about what you would do as far as what you would say, what you would not say? Did you know about your rights? Did you know anything going into that situation?





BECERRA:

No. No, we were very super amateurish, okay, very, very amateurish. I mean, we wouldn’t know. There was no way we would know. We did not have police records, okay. We were not in gangs. If you’re in a gang, everybody tells you you don’t rat, shut your mouth, don’t talk to pigs, you know, everything. So you’re already growing up in a gang, you’re already being trained on how to respond, and the cops know that, okay, because they’ll tell you the differences with different types of people that they arrest and what they expect. No, we didn’t know anything like that because that wasn’t our background. I mean, he was Young Citizens for Community Action. I’m a Vietnam vet. We didn’t have gang activity in our background, so, no, we would not know what to do. We’d have to learn the hard way.





ESPINO:

So what were those first lessons, then, after that arrest?





BECERRA:

I didn’t even learn then. I didn’t learn until March after the walkouts. You shut your mouth, you know. We were raising funds for the Defense Committee. We went to go talk to the Committee for Defense of the Bill of Rights, the Los Angeles Committee for Defense of the Bill of Rights, which was on Third Street just a few doors west of Broadway, the second floor. It was an organization of the Communist Party and they were very active in raising funds for activists, anybody who was being harassed by the police, being arrested, because they also saw this as a revolutionary period. Even though they weren’t going to—they’d already done their part. They were old. These people were, like, in their seventies already, you know, viejitos in their eighties, you know, folding envelopes for mailings.





ESPINO:

They did the thirties. They were the Depression-era Communists.





BECERRA:

Yes, and so I was very proud of them, you know. When I’m in my eighties, I want to be here folding envelopes and all that, you know, with the Communist Party.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

Even though I wasn’t a Communist, I wasn’t going to join the Communist Party, but I wanted to help, you know. If that’s what they’re going to be doing when I’m eighty years old, I want to be here with them, you know? So we talked to Rose Chernin, and she says, "When the cops arrest you, you shut your mouth. You don’t talk." We didn’t need a Miranda ruling to know what to do. She says, "You know you’re a revolutionary. The cops arrest you, you shut your mouth." She says, "We were in jail for six months under the Smith Act." She said, "We kept our mouth shut. That’s just the way it is." [laughs] They weren’t bullshitting. They were revolutionaries, you know, and she told us just like that, period. She didn’t want any loose talk while we were at the committee office, loose talk, talk crap. Everything was businesslike. She let everybody know that. There’s no way that they were going to go through that shit again as the Communist Party being caught up in any kind of conspiracy, any kind of anything.





ESPINO:

Leaving themselves vulnerable.





BECERRA:

Yeah, nothing. So she made it very clear.





ESPINO:

Wow.



0:38:37

BECERRA:

Yeah. So, no, I mean, that was a good experience for the Communist Party, probably the best experience. The other members of the Communist Party really didn’t know what they were doing at all. One thing that was really, like, heartbreaking for me when I was there at the Committee for the Defense of the Bill of Rights Office was one of the Communists told me, "You know, before, we used to think that maybe the Chinese would have to come here and liberate us, you know, and now that we see all you young people, all these revolutionaries, you know, we’ll make the revolution ourselves." And I thought, "Jesus Christ."

I mean, that was so foreign to my way of thinking, you know. I mean, they had seen the liberation of Eastern Europe and when the Soviet forces came in and liberated Eastern Europe from the Nazis, right? So the idea of foreign forces coming in and liberating a country wasn’t something foreign to them. They’d seen it already in Eastern Europe. And, of course, when revolutionaries do that, you don’t turn around and say, "Okay, now, capitalism, compared to this, you can have them back." No, you don’t do that, okay? The Red Army liberating those countries, you know the Red Army [unclear] eventually, like, but after they set up regimes and the withdrawal, there’s no way they’re going to say, "Okay, NATO, here you go. You can have ‘em all back." Bullshit.

So anyway, that’s the way they thought. I was an Eisenhower-era person, a Cold War-era child growing up. I didn’t think that way, you know, the way that they thought. To me, we’re going to make the revolution, not somebody else, and that’s the way we thought. When FBI people made their reports that foreign powers are pulling the strings, maybe they heard something like that, you know, but nobody was pulling our strings, you know. This is our land. We’ll liberate it ourselves, you know, period.





ESPINO:

Right, right. Well, during that first arrest, do you remember what kind of information they were trying to get from you, and how did you handle yourself? If you didn’t know how to handle yourself, what did you do?



0:39:55

BECERRA:

When we were in the patrol car—I think I told you this—there were two sheriff’s deputies in the front, and they were pissed at us, you know. They were brutal. They were just pissed, and they turned around, said, "So this is what you guys are about, huh, about class distinctions?"

Well, we know what they’re talking about, you know. We had an idea, right? They were talking about a class struggle, right? So [unclear] turned around and told them, "It’s not about class; it’s about racists." And they shit. They shit because, I mean, they could understand isolating Communists, but a bunch of pissed-off black and brown people, they don’t know how to handle that at all. And so they got scared, you know, and as long as we kept talking that way, they didn’t know what to do. They were scared. That was like their worst nightmare. I mean, they see Watts in ’65. Now here it is ’68, you know?





ESPINO:

Yeah.





BECERRA:

You’ve seen Newark, you’ve seen all this, and now you’ve seen a nascent movement of Chicanos, and they’re afraid. They were really, really afraid. So, no, when they interrogated us, no. There were bullies in the police station. The sheriffs who were bullies would come by and they try to intimidate you, you know. They’re going to beat the shit out of you if we mouth off. Instead of, like, trying to get information from us, they were trying to tell us to shut up or they’d beat us up. So, no, those particular officers were not interrogating us at that time.





ESPINO:

That’s interesting. So they themselves weren’t prepared for what was important to them.



0:41:54

BECERRA:

They didn’t know what was going on, had no idea. I mean, they would go around—there was this one sergeant, I think his name was Calderon or something like that, Danny, I remember that was his first name, sheriff, and he would go to community organizations to put down the Brown Berets, right, and tell them, "We have reports, we’ve heard that they’re being funded by foreign powers," right, so to try to scare the parents.

The kids would come back and talk to us. "You know what they’re saying about you?" And they’d be all pissed off the cops were talking that way about us, you know. And that wasn’t working and there was no way that was going to work, no way it was going to work. After we were arrested for conspiracy, the cops would go to community meetings, and people would talk. "You know what?" [laughs] This is at a community meeting. "You know that you are arresting these guys for conspiracy." This is a community meeting. "You know that’s a [unclear], man. That’s bullshit. You know that." And the cops didn’t know what to say because they knew it was and they didn’t know how to handle things. That’s why they would send people in.

Like the first guy, Bobby, he didn’t know how to handle us because he said, "These guys are not what you say they are. They’re not being manipulated by Communists or foreign powers or nothing. We’re with them every day." And I think that’s one of the reasons they started setting him up instead of sending spies in, sending in provocateurs to set a situation up where they would be able to arrest something, arrest them like for the Biltmore. Sure, they may have had fertile minds to work with, you know, but this is the type of thing the cops would have to do to get us for something.





ESPINO:

Because basically just looking at everybody’s experience that I’ve talked to up to this point, everybody was pretty much obedient in the sense of doing well in school, liking school, participating in voting and the Democratic politics of the early sixties, and then you don’t have this kind of like—I don’t know if "lawbreaker" is the correct word, but like you did your service for the military, you never got in trouble.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

The rule-followers. And then you become these militant activists. How did that happen, or can you pinpoint when that change occurred?





BECERRA:

No, because it never is one thing, you know. It’s a thing of how you grow up. I had to deal with racism and poverty, but especially racism, and then for me, the war, and then doing things you don’t believe in doing and being frustrated when you come back and still see the racism and still see—I mean every fucking day, every day the war’s still going through your head. And then, you know, knowing that there has to be an alternative to all of this and then trying to read about socialism, trying to read Marx and not being able to. [laughs] And finally when you hook up with Young Chicanos for Community Action, okay, now there’s people who think like I think, people who know we have to do something, we have to change things. That became the tipping point for me, that I wasn’t crazy. [laughs] Or like my daughter told me, "When they realized my daddy’s not crazy." She was already in college, third year of college, right? [laughs]





ESPINO:

That you’re not making all this up. Wow. So you said that the judge was really angry with you and he gave you and David the maximum.





BECERRA:

First offense maximum sentence, yes.





ESPINO:

Okay, before you finish with that thought, they didn’t ask you, like, who else is in the organization, what are your—they didn’t interrogate you like that?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

Wow. That’s fascinating. So then, okay, so the judge gives you the maximum sentence. You don’t have to testify or—





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

You just basically go before him, plead?





BECERRA:

You know what? I think we did have a trial, a short one. Yeah, we did, we did, and what I remember about that trial—that’s right, we did have a trial. It was very short, and what I remember was the cops got up there and just lied, lied like crazy. And I was surprised to the extent that they lied, okay, I mean really fabricated stuff. It wasn’t like if they come in here with a search warrant and says, "Yeah, we saw some cocaine on top of the table as we walked in," when really they searched all over to find it, right? No, they made shit up like crazy. And so we got up there. We said, "No, that’s not what happened," but it didn’t matter. They believed the police, which makes sense, you know, for the state to believe the police. Otherwise why are you paying them if you’re not going to believe the guys that you’re paying to do the job for you, right? You have to prove that they’re lying, you know, and it’s hard to do. So we didn’t have cell phones or cameras in those days, right? [laughs] So the judge sentenced us to the max.





ESPINO:

What were you thinking at that time?





BECERRA:

I’d just go do it.





ESPINO:

Really? You weren’t afraid or—





BECERRA:

No, no. I’d already been to boot camp. I’d already been overseas, you know. I’m just going to be in jail. It wasn’t going to be that big of a deal. And then when I got in there, I realized it wasn’t that big of a deal, you know. The worst part was being in the county eating shitty food, food that was really [demonstrates]. But once you got to camp, oh, god, it was good food, you know, and it was really like being in camp, you know, like if you’re a kid, right? Only thing is you have to work. You’re either in the plantation crew or the fire crew, and I was on the plantation crew, which I was very happy about because I didn’t have to go fight fires. And they had good food. Everything was great, you know. I mean, I’m sure today conditions are pathetic because there’s no money for anything.





ESPINO:

Right.





BECERRA:

But in those days, no.





ESPINO:

And the overcrowding.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

What about privacy? Was that something that was important to you or not important to you?





BECERRA:

I was in the navy laying on a ship with three hundred other guys. Forget about privacy. [laughs] I mean we used to sleep stacked three high, sometimes four high. That’s how we slept. That’s how we lived. So privacy, and I mean that’s in the navy, you know. Privacy’s not an issue at all. I mean, that was gone a long time ago.





ESPINO:

Well, when you think about some people who didn’t have that experience, what it must have been like to be arrested, like Moctesuma Esparza, who didn’t have that navy experience, you know, to get thrown in with all these—I don’t know if privacy was an issue for him, but it would definitely be for me, at least, thinking about it, so that’s why—



0:50:070:52:01

BECERRA:

No, the only issue that was really—the most dehumanizing issue is when you get booked in a central jail, okay? You’re strip-searched, cavity-searched. Those kinds of things are really—you get pissed. The last time I was in jail was two years ago, okay, for tickets that I didn’t pay, right? No, I did pay the tickets, but then I had to show up to show the judge that I paid them, that I’d taken care of everything. No, I didn’t pay the ticket. I took care of the violation. Everything except I didn’t go back to court to tell the judge.

Okay, so then what happens, I go through, and they don’t do cavity searches anymore. They don’t do strip searches anymore. They stopped doing that. In fact, the cell I was being held in at East L.A. Court, one of the guys had—I don’t know if it was cocaine or heroin, and he’s talking to another guy. So they’re both drug addicts. So the guy, he had a "keister stash," right? So he takes it out and they clean it, they wash it. I guess it was wrapped in cellophane or whatever, and then they do the dope, right? And he asked me, you know, did I want some because he has, like, four rows. There was four of us in the cell, so he’s got four rows, one for each guy, and he asked me if I wanted some. I was so pissed, you know, what I just saw. He’s living, like, in a halfway house. He’s living with a priest who runs the halfway house.

He was supposed to be doing this to get over it and the guy is violating the confidence of the [unclear]. I understand he’s an addict and it doesn’t matter what; he’s still an addict. He’s going to be an addict his whole life, right? Even if you stop using it, you’re still an addict, right? And so then I’m so pissed off, and it’s not like I got this holier-than-thou attitude. Maybe because I’m an old man now. [laughs] I’m sure that has a lot to do with it, too, right? And so they do it and he tells me if I want some. I said, "No." So they do it. Then he puts what’s left, he puts it back up in there, and the guy says, "Hey, man, they’re going to search you." He says, "No," he says, "they don’t do cavity searches anymore," which was true. So we got booked. He was able to take it in with him because he wasn’t searched.

Now, I can’t even understand, if you’re only going to, like, do it two times while you’re in there, why bother? But the thing is that he got released a day before I did because I was held over one more night. He got released before I did, the guy that had the "keister stash," so maybe it was worth it for him. But, no, they don’t do "keister stashes," no more cavity searches anymore.





ESPINO:

Can you repeat that? I’m not sure what that is. What are you calling it?





BECERRA:

The "keister stash"?





ESPINO:

Keister?





BECERRA:

Stash.





ESPINO:

Is that a name of something? [Becerra laughs.] I’m sorry. I don’t know.





BECERRA:

Okay.





ESPINO:

I’m just wondering if the transcriber’s going to be able to—if I Google it, how am I going to find it? [laughs]





BECERRA:

You can Google it. You’ll find it.





ESPINO:

How do you spell it?





BECERRA:

I don’t know.





ESPINO:

Okay. That’s the problem. You have to know how to spell it.





BECERRA:

Probably with a K.





ESPINO:

Keister. Okay.





BECERRA:

"Keister," okay, is an old-fashioned term for your butt.





ESPINO:

Oh, I didn’t know that.





BECERRA:

Okay, so when you "keister stash"—





ESPINO:

Okay, now I—





BECERRA:

Okay.





ESPINO:

Yeah.





BECERRA:

And since they don’t do cavity searches anymore—





ESPINO:

Oh, right.





BECERRA:

Yeah, no more strip searches, which usually involves a cavity search, then they can get away with it. So they don’t have to worry about it.





ESPINO:

So did that experience make you feel like they should still be doing them or—





BECERRA:

No, no. I mean, who cares? The only thing you’re going to get are their drugs and it’s going to be very limited how much you can get in. So, no, I don’t think it’s worth it.





ESPINO:

Yeah, to have that—





BECERRA:

People going through all that.





ESPINO:

Yeah, because—yeah.





BECERRA:

To go through all that, put people through all of that—





ESPINO:

Right.





BECERRA:

—when just a few guys, very few guys are going to be actually doing "keister stashes."





ESPINO:

Right, right.





BECERRA:

Because you’ve got two that got those and one guy who was, like, a recreational user. Those three guys did it, and I didn’t, you know. I didn’t let them see how disgusted I was with the idea, right, but, no, it’s all right. I just said, "No." [laughs]





ESPINO:

And you don’t know why you were so disgusted, why it [unclear]?





BECERRA:

Yeah, I know why. Because I’m thinking, you know, the assholes. People that you were living with are trying to help you out, you know, and you still won’t give it up. And I’m reacting very, like, emotional to it, rather than objectively. You know, the guy is an addict, okay? Forget it. He’s going to be an addict for a long, long time, until something in his life makes him change and he makes that change on his own. But he’s too young. Maybe he’s thirty years old, okay. He hasn’t come to that point in his life when he’s going to give it up, okay, and maybe he’ll never reach that point; he’ll OD before that point comes.





ESPINO:

Right.





BECERRA:

So I’m just reacting very, like, emotional to it.





ESPINO:

Did you always have that position about drugs?





BECERRA:

What’s that?





ESPINO:

Well, it sounds like you’re against people using to that degree.





BECERRA:

No, I’m against people using it. I’m not sure—like, as far as, like, the War on Drugs thing, no, I don’t buy into that at all.





ESPINO:

Well, one of the issues that the Brown Berets were working toward and some of the other organizations, like, for example, the Committee to Free [Spanish name], they were trying to get drugs out of the community. I thought the Brown Berets were also trying to deal with that issue. Maybe I’m confusing—maybe they were using drugs. [laughs]





BECERRA:

No, they weren’t. I mean, David, maybe acid, you know, but you’ve got to remember, in those days, you know, I would have taken acid. In fact, I think I did, or mescaline or something, right? But you’d make a distinction between that and, say, heroin or reds. We called them reds at that time. Those kinds of drugs, no. That was totally different. You know, maybe a little bit of speed because you had to drive a lot of distances, but [unclear], stuff like that, you know, but as far as, like, heroin were just the main thing, not cocaine at that time, we would have been opposed to that. As far as getting drugs out of the barrio, that was more a slogan, because you’re not going to be able to get them out of there.





ESPINO:

Uh-huh. But some people were definitely—like, I can’t remember now who told me, but someone said that they never did drugs because they saw what it did to the community, about what a poison it was. Did you have that position, that you looked at drugs, even marijuana, as a poison in the community?



0:57:29

BECERRA:

No, no. To me, you know, I liked smoking weed. I liked taking mescaline, not acid so much, but mescaline. That was it. And the only time I ever took anything like speed would have been when we went driving for a long distance cross country, and that would be the only reason, not recreation uses, but very utilitarian use. But as far as recreational, no. It would have been weed, mescaline, that’s it. And, no, I didn’t have any problems with it, not then, not ever.

Afterwards, I had problems with people taking acid because I did see the results of it, you know, but as far as going on a campaign against acid, it made no sense, you know. To go on a campaign against heroin, it made no sense. People were going to use it for different reasons. The reason had nothing to do with us. You can say we’re on a campaign against drugs in the community. Well, all you can do is talk about it. That’s all you’re going to be able to do, you know, nothing else.





ESPINO:

Well, how about the idea that the Brown Berets were partying a lot, were getting together? Someone said that—well, maybe this was after you left, but that the clinic, the barrio Free Clinic was used as a place where the Brown Berets, mostly the men, would go and take girls and drink, and then the next day they would have to open up and clean up the mess that had been made the night before. Was that ever part of your experience?





BECERRA:

No, no. But let’s say that—I don’t know what you expect, you know. I don’t mean you personally, okay? [laughs]





ESPINO:

I expect a lot. [laughs]





BECERRA:

But I don’t know what you would expect. These Brown Berets are in their early twenties. They’re going to party, okay, and, yes, they’re going to hook up with girls and they’re going to go party in the office. I don’t know if it was done and how often was it. I wasn’t there. But why am I supposed to find that unusual that young people like to party? They like to smoke weed, they like to drink, they like to have sex. Why am I supposed to [unclear]? It wasn’t a seminary, okay? It was young people, and we’re talking about the sixties, where people were drinking, smoking dope, and having sex. Okay, so why are the Brown Berets going to be any different than anybody else when it comes to that? And they’re part of that movement, that cultural change that’s taking place in the sixties. So I don’t know what the problem is here.





ESPINO:

Well, the critique wasn’t so much that it was happening. It was more about leaving the dirty work for other people.





BECERRA:

Like what dirty work?





ESPINO:

To clean up the mess that was left.





BECERRA:

Ah, shit. Well, okay. Well, that’s different. Okay, that’s different. That’s a different issue altogether.





ESPINO:

Yeah, cleaning up—like using this space that was meant to help the community and using it in a way that it wasn’t meant to be used and then leaving a mess for the people who worked there to clean up.





BECERRA:

Yeah, of course. [unclear] just be rotten, selfish. Yeah, that’s just [unclear]. Okay, that’s a different issue altogether, okay? No, that’s a rotten thing to do, obviously.





ESPINO:

But you didn’t witness that?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

You’re saying you never experienced that?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

You don’t know who or what, when, where, how?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

So my question just was did you witness that, were you a part of that, and I guess the idea for bringing that up is you are in this cultural change, the 1960s. Everything is shifting. Gender roles are shifting and people are taking on different responsibilities, and you’re interacting with people who you might have never met had you not been in the Chicano Movement. But then you join—because last time you said that when you started to form La Junta, there were no women involved, and you said because you generally gravitate towards the men.

So, not looking today, because today you have a different consciousness, you have your daughter, who you say is a strong feminist, who’s influential in helping you to come to these ideas, but back then it was a completely different—how did you view women’s roles back then in the sixties? Did you see them as—I mean, could you cross that line and not look at them differently? Because it’s David who says that, "We never put them on the front lines because they were scared." I think that’s what he said, they were afraid or they never wanted to be on the front lines. And then the women say something different.





BECERRA:

Okay, there’s a difference between, say, ’68 and something totally different by ’71, ’72, okay? In ’68, the role of women, I just saw two roles, okay? They were either my comrades or the girls I partied with. That was it. Like you talk about Ruth. She was my comrade, you know, and there were other women like that who were my comrades, and that’s the way I viewed them, period, you know, respected them, right. And then there were the girls that you met, the groupies, and that happened a lot. Those are girls that you partied with, and, no, you weren’t—you know, yeah, you could talk politics, stuff like that, but you can tell when somebody’s there basically to party, hang out, okay, and that’s what you’re going to do.

Then as far as, like, La Junta, yeah, we gravitated—it was all guys, you know. It’s all guys, and, yeah, there were going to be girls around, but the girls were not in La Junta. They were friends, you know, girlfriends and stuff like that. And La Junta wasn’t going to last that long anyway before we moved on. Okay, then by the time 1971 comes around, because that wasn’t active, say, from ’69, 1969, I’m not active anymore after that, so I’m not active again for two years, till ’71, and then everything’s totally different.





ESPINO:

Take a hiatus?





BECERRA:

Huh?





ESPINO:

You take a hiatus?





BECERRA:

Yes. Yes, and then everything is different, totally, both in terms of my consciousness and in terms of the movement’s consciousness. In ’68, even into the early seventies, the Chicanas are still really pissed off at the white feminists, okay, really pissed off at them. They have a strong dislike for them and they talk about it a lot.





ESPINO:

They themselves talked about it?





BECERRA:

Oh, yeah, they hated them.





ESPINO:

Because there’s some literature that says—where the women say that if we had any feminist views, the men would call us agringada or they would call us "whitewash" or they would say that we were trying to be like the white liberals rather than having their own evolution of an idea of [unclear].



1:06:581:08:27

BECERRA:

Okay, that’s going to depend on what year you’re talking about, because everything changes, okay. If you’re talking about ’68, ’69, ’70, yeah, I can see that very, very clearly. But remember, I mean, I used to talk to the Chicanas who were activists and they referred to the white feminists as our white feminist sister. They call them the white bitches, "That white bitch, hear what she’s saying?" blah, blah, blah. Because they were trying to turn the Chicanas against the Chicanos, okay, and they saw themselves as revolutionaries, you know, and so they would get pissed.

By the time ’70 rolls around, the changes that have occurred affects both the men and women. There’s still a big split between the Chicana feminists and the white feminists, okay, even in ’71, ’72, but also the Chicanas are getting a lot more conscious and the Chicanos that I was around are also changing a lot, a lot, not a little bit. Even when we don’t understand the issues involved, you know, we understand that they’re right, you know, that equality for women is right. We understand that democratic rights are the right thing, and even if some of the white feminists are still throwing shit at us and we don’t like them, we understand these are our sisters, you know, we’ve got to treat them right, you know.

To even put it more into context, in 1975, I think I told you before that the International Women’s Conference takes place in Mexico City, okay, and a big split occurs there between the white feminists, which are North American, and the European feminists on one side and the third-world feminists on the other, okay. And the big split takes place over what are the issues. The white feminists take on solely the question of men, okay, the white men, you know, patriarchy, period, and all they want to do is take on men. And it makes sense.

You know, it makes sense that the white feminists would be doing that because for them the only thing they have to deal with, really—because these are bourgeois feminists—the only thing they have to deal with is white men who stand in the way of moving forward, moving up, okay. With non-white feminists, they have a lot of other issues. Questions of class are more crystallized, questions of nationality, ethnicity, race. Those are far clearer to them, and that’s what they see when they walk out the door, right? The issue that the white feminists are seeing aren’t the same as what they see. When they open up their door in the morning, walk out in the street, the world they see is not the one these women are facing when they walk out the door.

They have totally different issues, and that crystallized in—they’re not totally different, but the priorities are different, okay, and that affects us, too, how we’re going to see things, not just the Chicana feminists, but how we’re going to see things. And so we’re changing because we know what we’re supposed to be doing. And so we understand that is how it affects Chicanas, those issues are important, you know, and so we react different, not 100 percent. Not by any means is it 100 percent, okay, but we understand that we’re going to have to be changing and we start slowly, slowly, a huevo, the men, okay, that we have to deal with it. We have to discuss those issues, okay. Like in the Labor Committee, we have to discuss those issues and we do, okay, as men, okay, and then with the women, together with the women. All right? And then we set up a woman’s group in the Labor Committee, but that was a disaster. [laughs]





ESPINO:

What are you talking about? Are you talking about La Junta? No.





BECERRA:

Labor Committee.





ESPINO:

The Labor Committee, which is something that you were involved in—





BECERRA:

La Raza Unida Party.





ESPINO:

—in the La Raza Unida—okay.





BECERRA:

1971, 1972, La Raza Unida Party.





ESPINO:

So with the La Raza Unida Party, then in ’71, you start to deal more theoretically with these issues. Prior, like in La Junta or even ATM—when does ATM form?





BECERRA:

After the Labor Committee.





ESPINO:

After the La Raza, okay. Many, many of the men in the Chicano Movement, well, for many different reasons, were drawn to Anglo women, dated them, married them. Was that ever something that you felt or were you drawn to white women in that way as far as—there was a different kind of an intellectual relationship, having come from different cultures and different upbringings, and maybe some of the men were in universities and there just weren’t a lot of Chicanas at that time, so they formed relationships.





BECERRA:

No, in the Brown Berets and into La Junta, I was very proud that I never dated a white woman, okay. [laughs] It was a point of pride, right, an issue of pride, so, no. Then in the Labor Committee and as a Communist, I dated one white girl and she was very nice. It only lasted for a few months because then I met another girl who would become my second wife, and when I was with her, I thought, well, I can’t continue. I had to choose. I had to decide. I said, "I’m coming to stay with you, so I have to break off the other relationship." So I had to go back and tell the other girl, "No, I can’t." I had to choose and I decided to go with the other girl. Just one of many times I was an asshole. [laughs]





ESPINO:

So that’s interesting. Can you elaborate on that, on the point that you made that it was a point of pride, it was something—why was that important to you?





BECERRA:

Because I couldn’t talk about being brown and being proud and then going out with white women. I mean, it didn’t make any sense, you know. And the other thing was if I was going to make babies, I figured they better be brown babies. You know, I’m not saying that I was right for thinking this. I’m just telling you what I was thinking then, okay, and it wasn’t a point of disliking white people at all, you know. It was just the point of just being proud of being a Chicano and I wanted my girlfriends to be brown. They didn’t have to be Chicanas, you know. They could have been South Central Filipino. It didn’t matter, okay, but they just couldn’t be white, okay. Yeah, that mattered to me. It mattered a lot. Otherwise I thought that was being—I was a bullshitter, really. I was just bullshitting, you know. [laughs] I told you years later I was talking to Bill Gallegos and he tells me, "Remember all those white girls we turned down when we were Nationalists?" "Yeah." "Don’t you want to kick yourself in the ass now for that?" [laughs] I said, "Yeah," but it did matter. That’s how we felt then. I mean, we just turned it down. We just turned them down, right, because it wasn’t an abstract issue, just that, no, I’m not going to do it. No, it was there.





ESPINO:

Right.





BECERRA:

It was there and we just said, "No."





ESPINO:

So how did you view those who didn’t turn it down? Did they lose credibility within the movement?





BECERRA:

They did with the women, you know, certainly with the women. With the men, you know, you didn’t lose credibility. You just were disappointed with them. I’m talking about guys doing it then, okay. If guys were older and had married a white woman before the movement started, no, that’s what they did before, and we could forgive them, right? [laughs] But we’re talking about youngsters our age, you know, talking one thing and doing another thing. Yeah, it was hypocritical. To me, it was hypocritical.





ESPINO:

Were African American women or Asian American women part of that community? Was that ever—I mean, it seems like white women made themselves present in different ways, maybe helping out or participating in the marches or maybe even in the church, in the Episcopal Church, but would you see African American women, other groups as well?





BECERRA:

No, no. And, you know, most of the time, you know, not all the white women who came around, not all the white women were the same, okay? There were women who came in with a lot of self-interest, okay, into the Chicano Movement out of self-interest for whatever, okay, like professionals who want to see what we were like, maybe want to write a book, whatever. Okay. Then there were other white women who came who were much more, let’s say, selfless, okay, who saw the struggle as something they wanted to be a part of okay? And those were different girls, you know, and there was different young women and you looked at them differently, but your attitude, as far as, like, having sex with them, no, they were still white women and, no, you still didn’t do it. Some of us, okay, some of us. There were other guys who, you know, they were just—I think I didn’t get the point, you know. I didn’t get the point why they would do that. I didn’t understand why they would do that.





ESPINO:

Now, looking back, do you understand why they did that?





BECERRA:

No. Now, looking back, on the one hand, I don’t see it wrong with interracial couples at all, right, but under the circumstances then, you know, no, you can’t do that. You can’t say one thing and do something else. No, you can’t do that. And, yeah, I think it was wrong, not wrong in the sense that you disown somebody for doing that. It was just wrong. And it was going to be the other way around, too, where Chicanas are going to be with white guys. That was going to happen too.





ESPINO:

It doesn’t seem like it happened that much.





BECERRA:

Oh, shit. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Maybe I’m not interviewing the right people.





BECERRA:

I really didn’t want to talk about it, okay? [laughs]





ESPINO:

Maybe I’m not asking the right questions.





BECERRA:

No, it happened. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Well, because there are several prominent white women in—well, maybe not several. Like, for example, Ruth is one. Devra Weber is another woman who was involved in the movement. But I can’t think of any white men come to my mind that had that same—like really penetrate, were able to become part of the movement, be accepted, be brought in, except for Father Luce and Father Wood, but they’re older and at a different level than—





BECERRA:

Okay, maybe because that is [unclear] ’68, okay? I didn’t see that until the seventies.





ESPINO:

In the seventies.





BECERRA:

What I’m talking about, yeah, I didn’t see it till the seventies.





ESPINO:

Okay.





BECERRA:

But in the sixties, ’68, no, ’69, no. I didn’t see it till, say, starting like in ’72 on. Then I saw it.





ESPINO:

Right. Then it became different.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Well, let me just—before I forget, Dionne Espinoza, do you know her? She’s a professor at Cal State University Los Angeles.





BECERRA:

What’s her name?





ESPINO:

Dionne Espinoza. She writes on Chicanas in the movement. So she looks at the La Raza Unida Party, the Brown Berets, and I believe another organization.





BECERRA:

Is she the one who started the archive?





ESPINO:

Yes. Yes, she did and she has a paper on women in the Brown Berets and she was able to read Rona Fields’ study, and Rona Fields says that—where is it? Let me just pause it for a second. [recorder turned off]





ESPINO:

Okay, so she says that her account, it’s more like an ethnography, it’s not really—so like an anthropologist, like you said. She came in to study you like an anthropologist. So she says that the women appear passive, silent. The men were macho, kept the women in a secondary role. Do you think that’s an accurate observation of those early days?



1:22:18

BECERRA:

For what I saw, even though there were very few—remember, there was a lot of time that I wasn’t there because, like I told you, I was working swing shift. And so when people would gather at La Piranya at night, I wouldn’t be there. But based on what I did see, yeah, I would say that was true. I would say that was quite true. There were some women who were not going to be that way, okay. My sister was not that way at all and my sister let her views known and my sister was not protected in the background. This is a man’s job to throw rocks through windows and throw Molotov cocktails; that was not my sister. My sister would be right there in the front, okay? She wouldn’t want to hear any shit like that, that a woman’s role is to be in the background. Now, she would definitely take a position of standing by her man, backing her man, stuff like that, right, but when it came to fighting, no. No, she’d be right in the front line. If it was going to throw blows at cops, she’d be in the front line. If it came to being shut up as a woman, no, she would not take that. So it was like part traditional and part revolutionary, okay. Some tradition she’d hang on to, some she would not.

So on the one hand, she would still have her boyfriend, she would still show him respect in front of other people, let people know that’s her man, stuff like that, but he better not shut her up in front of other people, because she’s not going to take that, right? She’s not going to be docile, okay. I remember her. I remember how she was, you know, and when it came to throwing blows, she’d be in the front. She would not be in the back. She was not about to be protected, not at all.





ESPINO:

How did she get involved in the Brown Berets?





BECERRA:

Through me.





ESPINO:

You brought [unclear]?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

And then how long did she stay? Did she leave with you when you left?





BECERRA:

About the same amount of time. I can’t remember too much because either she was going to go back to work or she was going to go to San Jose State. I can’t remember exactly. A friend of ours got her into San Jose State, so I can’t remember exactly what it was like.





ESPINO:

She moved away?





BECERRA:

Yeah, but I can’t remember the exact time. But she was there quite a while, because I remember at her funeral this last January, the preacher who officiated there used to hang out at the coffeehouse, La Piranya Coffeehouse, and his sister. And I never saw them because of my job, right, and that was for several months. So my sister was still there quite a bit of the time, but she was not going to be one of those docile people.





ESPINO:

How did she pass away? How did she die?





BECERRA:

Heart attack.





ESPINO:

Oh, I’m so sorry.





BECERRA:

She was young. She just turned sixty-five. It was just like a week, not even a week after her sixty-fifth birthday, she passed away.





ESPINO:

And nobody ever recorded her story?





BECERRA:

No, nobody did.





ESPINO:

Oh, that’s too bad.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

That’s too bad.





BECERRA:

She was the first Brown Beret girl.





ESPINO:

She was the first one?





BECERRA:

Yeah, the first girl Brown Beret.





ESPINO:

Wow. Oh, gosh. She lived here in Los Angeles or she stayed in San Jose?





BECERRA:

No, she moved back.





ESPINO:

She did move back.





BECERRA:

Yeah, she was living here in Buena Park, not far from her—almost across the street from her son. The last few weeks of her life, maybe the last two months, she was living with her son because she had ailments and stuff like that, so she was living with him.





ESPINO:

So what was her complete name that she was using back then?





BECERRA:

Back then it was Linda Olmeda. She never changed her name to Becerra.





ESPINO:

She never did?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

But she got married?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Did she change it after—





BECERRA:

Yeah, Ross was the last name. Ross, Linda Ross. So on her stone it’s going to say Erlinda, because that was her full name, Erlinda, Erlinda Becerra Ross. We’ll leave Olmeda out. When my brother’s stone, it says Ruben Olmeda Becerra.





ESPINO:

You’re the last survivor of your family.





BECERRA:

I’ve got a sister, a younger sister.





ESPINO:

Oh, that’s right.





BECERRA:

A younger sister.





ESPINO:

That’s right. You did have a little one after you were in the military.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Wow.





BECERRA:

She was born the same year that I went into the military.





ESPINO:

Did your sister have—I’m going to ask you because she’s not here to speak for herself.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

So I’m going to ask you about her. Generally, I wouldn’t because she could speak for herself, but since she’s passed, did she have a relationship with Gloria and—





BECERRA:

Gloria came in afterwards, right? Okay, Gloria came in afterwards.





ESPINO:

What about David? How did she deal with his leadership?





BECERRA:

Okay. There was no problem there. My sister, she was, like—her personality was like a cholia, you know, and she belonged to—I don’t know if you’d call it a gang, Harbor City. She claims Harbor City. She had the initials "HC" penciled on there, and so when she would come in—you’re not going to keep a cholia like that quiet, you know, or knowing her place, right? So she’d be joking, all talking, you know, and joking with everybody and stuff. She would be willing to get along with everybody, yeah. So, no, she would get along with everybody. That’s the way she was.





ESPINO:

But she wouldn’t challenge his leadership or criticize his—





BECERRA:

No matter what, women were never going to be a challenge to leadership, okay, not in the Brown Berets. Anywhere else, maybe, but not in the Brown Berets. That was going to be very much David’s leadership, period.





ESPINO:

So she looked up to him, essentially, do you think? She admired him?





BECERRA:

I don’t know. Later on, no, a few years later, no, but at that time, maybe. My sister was not—she looked up to me, okay, but she did not—I can’t see her looking up to somebody—oh, and Johnny Parsons, of course. She would look up to Johnny Parsons very, very much, because Johnny Parsons, he was like a theoretician. As a Nationalist, he was like a theoretician, and so to him, definitely. And to Ralph, she really liked Ralph a lot. Those are the people that she—and David Tacos. David, she liked David a lot, and everybody else she would just get along with. Oh, and Carlos, she liked Carlos.





ESPINO:

Carlos Montes?





BECERRA:

Carlos Montes, yes. She liked Carlos. But other people, I can’t remember, you know, her really liking.





ESPINO:

Richard [unclear], he was in the Brown Berets, wasn’t he? [unclear]? He was never a Brown Beret?





BECERRA:

Well, when I was there, he wasn’t.





ESPINO:

Okay.





BECERRA:

But she knew him. I think she knew him and she would have gotten along with him.





ESPINO:

Did they come to her funeral? Did anybody from that time come to her—





BECERRA:

Yes, Carlos Montes and Yvonne de los Santos, because in the seventies and eighties, my sister was at East L.A. College taking classes again to get her RN, and in MEChA she worked with Yvonne de los Santos, who was in the League at the time, and she worked with her on issues. And then the minister and his sister, Lizzy, they were at the coffeehouse, they were there also. But the actives from the time, Brown Berets from that time, Carlos Montes.





ESPINO:

And you mentioned Lizzy. Is it the same Lizzy that went to La Junta, the one you’re talking about right now? You mentioned a Lizzy going over with you to La Junta, I believe, or early Brown Beret. I would have to look at my notes.





BECERRA:

Early Brown Berets. I don’t remember she went to La Junta. I can’t remember.





ESPINO:

Okay, early Brown Beret, yeah. Oh, wow. I’m so sorry to hear that. That’s tragic that—do you think she has anything from that period, any, I don’t know, memorabilia or—





BECERRA:

I’ll ask her son. I’m supposed to get a hold of him.





ESPINO:

So were you involved in La Causa at all?





BECERRA:

The paper?





ESPINO:

Yeah.





BECERRA:

No, not at all.





ESPINO:

And you said that you didn’t see the Brown Book.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

And so I’m going to ask you about—except my computer died. Oh, no, there it is. When you decided to form La Junta, and this will be my—is that clock correct, 2:20?





BECERRA:

2:26.





ESPINO:

Okay. Did you already have an idea that you wanted to form La Junta before you left, or was that something that evolved after you left the Brown Berets?





BECERRA:

It evolved after, after.





ESPINO:

Can you talk to me about how that happened and what your thinking was at the time and what you wanted to obtain, what your objectives were for that group?





BECERRA:

[laughs] Okay, you’re going to have to ask me this next time. Let me tell you why.





ESPINO:

Is it a long story?





BECERRA:

No, it’s not that. It’s exactly that period of time we’re talking about, I have, like, a one-hour recording by Stan Steiner. He interviewed us, and Johnny Parsons was there, Tacos is there, I’m there, and Hippie is there. He left the Brown Berets also. And we talk about why, what, everything. We discussed this.





ESPINO:

Oh, perfect. Oh, perfect. So do you have it digitized?





BECERRA:

Yes, it’s on a CD.





ESPINO:

Can I hear it, or do you want to—





BECERRA:

Let me make a copy for you, because I don’t want to lose it.





ESPINO:

Okay. Okay, no, I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you at all.





BECERRA:

I mean that was 1968 or ’69. I can’t remember.





ESPINO:

When you wrote that book, it was early.





BECERRA:

Yeah.





ESPINO:

Then we’ll skip that, and you can tell me about the role of class politics in the movement and if it was important or if it—some books talk about it, but it’s, like, a page about the Marxist groups and the influence of Marxism. How important do you think Marxism was in shaping the ideology of Chicano Movement activists?





BECERRA:

[laughs] I think it was, like, fundamental, okay, not in 1968, not in 1969, okay, but from ’72 on. From 1972 on, yes. I think that it influenced a lot of the Chicano Studies departments, a lot of the professors, a lot of the professionals who came out, and I think it was a lot of politicians that were, at that time, Marxist-Leninist, you know, who are today politicians, right? I don’t want to mention their names, but I can roll them off, right?





ESPINO:

Really? That many?





BECERRA:

Sure. [interruption]





ESPINO:

So you can tell that it’s recording when it’s not blinking.





BECERRA:

So you had asked me did we influence the movement. Yes. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Or how important, like, for example, certain ideas, like as the movement was beginning to emerge, people mention Franz Fanon, those kinds of ideas.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

The Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X. So I’m just wondering, in comparing Marxist ideology, Leninism, how influential do you think those ideas were for members of the Chicano Movement, at least the members that you came across in the organizations that you were in?



1:34:411:36:23

BECERRA:

Okay, whose ideas now we’re talking about? Because if we talk about Franz Fanon, we rejected his ideas, not his psychology, just one issue that we rejected on his part. Okay. The only issue that we rejected really was that he said that in third-world countries that were not industrialized where there was no industrial proletariat, that the vanguard of the revolution would be the Lumpenproletariat, and we rejected that totally, thoroughly, totally rejected that.

But he did influence some people, okay, and in that regard, because there were people who were involved in what was called a Prison Movement, okay, and I think the Prison Movement was a good movement. I wish we had it today, but the conditions of the prisons are not such that we could have a Prison Movement today, of taking study material to the prisons, giving talks to the prisoners, Marxist talks, talks about the social struggle, the outside, helping them prepare for their life when they can come out, what the world would be like, how we could add some meaning to their lives for when they came out of the prisons so they wouldn’t just come out and think, "I’m just an ex-junkie," or, "I’m just an armed robber. There’s a reason why this happened, and I’m a part of society. There’s something that I can do beyond what I’ve done."

You can add a lot of importance and a lot of significance to their self-perceptions when they would come out. I think it was very important, that Prison Movement, and it wasn’t a question of turning them into Communists at all. Franz Fanon, that theory of the proletariat being the vanguard of the revolution was what we rejected. Black Panther Party accepted it. We did not, okay, because by now it’s 1972, ’73, ’74, and we have a Marxist perspective and so we’re going to stick to that, that the working-class is the vanguard of the revolutionary struggle, not by itself, but it’s the vanguard of the revolutionary struggle, and certainly the ideology of the working-class is going to be the leading ideology of any movement, of any revolution.

That’s one of the views that we put forward, and when we were in La Raza Unida Party, we were not alone in California. We were not alone. In fact, our views were, without a doubt, not as the Labor Committee, but as Socialists, our views were, without a doubt, the dominant views of the La Raza Unida Party in California. That would put us on a collision course with Texas, okay, which was very conservative and whose views we did not agree with. Today [unclear] Chicano this, kill the gringo, stuff like that. They used to have Kill the Gringo marches in Texas, and we’d think, "What the fuck is that?" They were kept on that course by people who thought it was important that they not turn to socialism or Socialist views, for whatever reason.

So the ideas what we had, academics coming from Texas, they would be influenced by Marxist ideology because they didn’t stay in Texas and their experiences weren’t restricted to the Rio Grande Valley, okay, and they knew the history of the Rio Grande Valley, which had a very strong influence by the Communist Movement in the Rio Grande Valley during the thirties and then into the forties. So, no, we, as a movement, as a Marxist Movement, had a tremendous influence and it went to everywhere and schoolteachers, politics, everywhere you go, in the trade unions, in the Labor Movement, everywhere. Yeah, we were very, very influential. I mean, the examples I gave you. I could go to labor and give you examples in labor. I just gave you in politics, and that’s not counting in the academic arena. And of course that was going to influence teachers and professionals in other areas. So, no, it became fundamental.





ESPINO:

More than any other ideology, Trotskyism? I don’t know. What else would there be? [interruption]





ESPINO:

I’m trying to think of what other—well, the Socialist Workers Party, they were still around. They’re still around.





BECERRA:

Yes, they changed their names, but they’re still around.





ESPINO:

And the RTP, is that what it is, the Revolutionary something?





BECERRA:

It was the Revolutionary Union then.





ESPINO:

Yes, yes, RU, and then the Long March.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Are these all Marxist—



1:40:14

BECERRA:

Yes. Okay, the October League was Marxist. They were very good people. I’m sorry that the opportunist wing gained control there and voted to dissolve the organization, okay, and they liquidated the organization. They still have influence, though, on a lot of Chicanos. The Revolutionary Union became the Revolutionary Communist Party. They’re still around, but they did not get a real foothold in the Chicano Movement. I shouldn’t say that. They did get a foothold and they were able to influence Chicanos also, not to the degree that the League did, okay, the League for Revolutionary Struggle, yeah, not to that degree. Nobody got that close.

The October League also did get a foothold, but they didn’t come close to the League for Revolutionary Struggle. The Communist League also influenced it, but again not as much as what would become the League of Revolutionary Struggle, nowhere near that. But even given that, all together we’re also Marxists, and so they did influence the movement as well all together, with all their groupings. Yeah, all of them did, and that was the most influential ideology, I mean I think even more than the Communist Party was able to influence things within the Chicano Movement, even though they did, okay, they did. But the problem was that then the McCarthy era came in and the Smith Act came in and just destroyed them. So maybe they did get—was influential. I think that in terms of the [unclear] developments in the community, yes, they did. They were just as influential as we were, but given how many—but they were not, I wouldn’t say, as broadly influential as we became after the Chicano Movement, because that made a big difference.





ESPINO:

Well, how would you describe that difference? How would you differentiate? Because I’m thinking about some of the most profound episodes of that period when you’re looking at ’68 to ’78 were the walkouts, the moratorium. What would be some of the defining actions of that mid-seventies period when Marxism is heavily influencing the organizations?





BECERRA:

Okay, it isn’t ’78. Maybe ’88 would be closer.





ESPINO:

Eighty-eight?





BECERRA:

Yes, because, like, for example, the League wasn’t liquidated until just about ’88, ’89, 90, maybe ’91, and by then it had a tremendous influence on all the—you’re looking at events. Again, I’m looking at organizations. I’m looking at MEChA, okay, and the fights within MEChA to save Chicano Studies, for example. I mean, even Rudy Acuña has made the statement that the League saved Chicano Studies because the League was taking on CASA at the time. There was this huge struggle between CASA and the League over the leadership of MEChA and whoever led MEChA would also be determining the role of Chicano Studies [unclear]. Of course, Chicano Studies today isn’t what it was then and the influence of MEChA today isn’t what it was then, but all the people that were influenced during that period of time, because whether it was CASA or whether it was the League, I think they were both Marxist. They were both Marxist-Leninist organizations and both were organizations that were fighting for the control of MEChA. I mean, everybody else is out of the picture, all right? So when you ask about the role of Marxists in the movement, I mean, it’s phenomenal. [laughs] It’s phenomenal. And the people are still here, they’re still alive and the leadership, I told you.





ESPINO:

Are they still operating on those ideas, though?





BECERRA:

No. There’s a couple of things, things that changes. The organizations are not here anymore, okay, so they have to operate on the basis of the views, the values that they had at that time. Now, obviously, some things are going to change. I don’t think any of them are going to be calling for an insurrection, for an armed insurrection. That has changed, definitely. I mean, first of all, it’d be so out of context. It wouldn’t make sense to do that. Okay, that’s changed. But if you look at their values and the stance they take on issues, it wouldn’t matter. It would be the same stance they would be taking if they were still dues-paying members of those organizations, because those are exactly the same issues and the same stands that we would be taking because that’s what stands we took then and those are the stands we would be taking today.

Sure, there would be tactical differences, but in terms of values, no, they would be the same, the same basic stands. Yeah, so that hasn’t changed. And then you influence also the liberals, because the liberals have to take those stands, too, to maintain any kind of credibility. So even the liberals were influenced, you know, going through [unclear] that period of time. They never joined these organizations, but they were influenced very much by those organizations. They might have been afraid because of their career goals. They were [unclear] they had in college and so they had to be careful then who they joined and what they hooked up with.





ESPINO:

Well, how would you describe the change? I mean, how would you describe the influence on your own changing, evolving ideology? How did it shape your activism after you left the Brown Berets?



1:47:591:49:521:51:461:53:40

BECERRA:

Okay, first and foremost was the role of the working-class as a class and that occurred, say, in 1970, ’71, during the two major strikes I think I told you about, two wildcat strikes, one by the Teamsters and one by the postal workers, that brought the country to a halt, okay. No matter where you were working, it brought the country to a halt. And then I saw what Marx was talking about, about the strategic point of the working-class in society that can stop everything. That was the first thing. Okay, that’s what gets me thinking, "Okay, wait a minute. This is the way we have to go, okay, because the ideas of Marx are not abstract. I just saw them happen."

One day I was talking with my daughter, and because she’s studying philosophies and all kinds of philosophers and stuff, she’ll go through different changes in terms of who she’s studying, why, and everything. One of the things she told me one time was, "Dad," she says, "you know, I was thinking. Society has changed so much that Marxist writings don’t apply anymore." I say, "They don’t apply anymore?" She says, "No." [laughs] And I said, "It’s a good thing I’m not paying for your college anymore." But I said, "You’re just studying a lot of different philosophies in college and that’s good. I mean, not that I have anything to say about it or do about it, but I’m happy. We’ll discuss—." And we do. We do discuss a lot of issues.

But as far as Marx not being applicable anymore, you know, every month when my Social Security check comes in, I kiss it and say, "Thank you, Karl Marx." So I don’t really need a philosopher to tell me how he applies or doesn’t apply. Every month I’m reminded of how he does apply. These things, we didn’t get these things if it wasn’t for Karl Marx and the threat that communism posed to American capitalism. We wouldn’t have gotten it. That’s how we got it. But at that time, you know, in ’70, I got a very rudimentary understanding of what it was. Then I had to seek out other people who thought that way, and that’s when for a second time I ran into Jimmy Franco, who I’d known before and he, too, was studying and trying to understand these things, and then Rudy Quinonas and then together we founded the Labor Committee of La Raza Unida Party and we started studying.

Then we had to seek help from other Marxists who would be able to help us, right, which we’d be studying right now. That’s where they give us the correct writings of Marx to be studying, not the heavy stuff that we’re never going to understand unless we have somebody teaching us, giving us a course in it, but writings. Marx wrote specifically for the working-class the Manifesto, Wage, Labor, and Capital, and there’s another one, but I forget the—with price and profit. I forget if it was—it wasn’t Wage, Labor, and Capital. It was Value, Price, and Profit, I think it was called, was the name of it.

Those things are so the working-class can understand how we create superfluous value, how it is appropriated by the capitalist class, how that’s utilized to rule, and the Manifesto already tells you how it’s being utilized to rule. But all those things coming in together, then we start getting understanding. Then we start studying revolutionary writings of Lenin and then of Stalin and of Mao, writings of Engels and some things that we understand are revolutionary writings and are going to start guiding us. They’re hard to read. Most of the time, they’re very difficult to read. With Lenin, because of the way he writes, he writes like he was writing a thesis, you know, I mean, like, very intellectual writing, and then it’s out of context for us because he’s writing at a particular time in a particular place under particular conditions.

So then we have to study those things and we need to study them enough to understand what he’s trying to tell us, but we get an idea. Stalin was much easier to read, and then Mao, but with Stalin and Mao, the issue became one of context. But still, it’s things that we could identify with much easier than with Marx or Lenin. Lenin later on, he writes things that—like he writes like maybe you don’t understand the first time, okay, so I’m going to write to you again so you understand this time, and he writes The State and Revolution. He writes about communism and infantile disorder and then he writes imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. When he writes that, it changes everything. It changes everything.

And then even if you miss Marx, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. "This is how the world is today and this is how you make revolution today." Sure, wage, labor and [unclear] labor, yes, this is true, although now wage labor isn’t just here, it’s going to be in Mexico, it’s going to be in China, it’s going to be in these other countries and we have to deal with that issue now. Okay, now the banks and finance capital and industrial capital are going to merge and finance capital is going to be on top and you’re going to have to understand that now. Now you’re going to see that yesterday’s superpower is today’s third-world country, okay. All those things are going to change. So now how are you going to make a revolution when everything is changing? And he says, "Now you have to find out where, since you have one economic system worldwide, where is the chain in imperialism going to be the weakest and where’s the weakest? That’s where you’re going to strike."

He said, "So the countries in the third world are going to be just as revolutionary, if not more so, than workers in the industrialized countries." He says, "That’s where we’ll make revolution first, because that’s where the chain of imperialism will be the weakest." Okay, so don’t look for it in Europe and don’t look for it in the U.S. He says, "It may happen there, but it may not. It may happen in third-world countries." Stalin steps in and then he starts saying, "Okay, now the struggle for the liberation of the colonized countries, of the oppressed countries, it’s not going to fall to the revolutionary nationalists anymore. Now it falls to the Communists. The Communists have to pick up the banner of national liberation and carry it forward and that’s how you’re going to lead the revolution."

Okay, when we read that, we said, "Chingao." [laughs] "You guys are telling us what we’re supposed to do." I mean just laid it out for us, just laid it out for us. So now we have to deal with the issue. How do you do that in an industrialized country with a multinational proletariat? What is our role? Now comes the real work, have us figure out how we’re going to carry out that struggle, how do you apply the theory now or develop it because these are new conditions. And there were people who tried. The revolutionary [unclear] tried. We criticized them for it, but they said that Chicanos in the Southwest or blacks in the South were a nation of a new type. We were a nation, but we were a nation of a new type, I think with the proletariat in the forefront, etc., but the slogan for us would not be national independence; it would be regional autonomy. So at least they tried to develop a theory. We rejected it.





ESPINO:

For people of color in the United States?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes. And actually not just—that would be the issue for the entire revolution, okay, because there’s no way you’re going to talk about black people and the struggle of Chicanos unless it’s part of the overall revolutionary struggle.





ESPINO:

Right.





BECERRA:

You can’t. That’s impossible, right? So that’s a part of a revolutionary—how does it fit in? That’s where we’d have disagreements, both with the October League, with the Revolutionary Union, with the Communist League, you know, in the application of Lenin’s theory and the development of Lenin’s theory, because now we’re having to evolve it further. We couldn’t go on the basis of, yeah, here it is. Now what’s it going to mean here? No, you have to get all the [unclear].





ESPINO:

And that’s what happened, say, with CASA when it changed, when Bert Corona was no longer in the leadership?





BECERRA:

I don’t know the exact struggle there. I do know that the guys who were there were always revolutionaries. I disagreed with them, but you can’t doubt for a moment that they were always revolutionaries. But how that change took place, I don’t know. I wasn’t around them just to see that—





ESPINO:

They weren’t part of your same study groups, people from the Committee to Free [unclear] and CASA? You had your own separate—





BECERRA:

Yes, we had our own separate—





ESPINO:

So it’s like these two parallel organizations studying the same thing, basically, maybe interpreting it different, but the same texts, reading the same books.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

But in the same locale, East Los Angeles, or were you in a different location at that point?





BECERRA:

No, we were at the same place. We were [unclear] bigger, but we were in the same place here, basically L.A. They did have CASAs in other places, okay, not just L.A., but the main struggle took place here. Yeah, but there’s a couple of things. One is that we disagreed theoretically, and once you disagree theoretically and you want to be the most influential, because if you think you’re right, you want to spread that influence, right? So at a particular moment, that theoretical struggle becomes very much a political struggle, and then you get into a clash and then you get down to the basics of what this was all about in the first place: power. [laughs] It all goes back from the day you walk into La Piranya Coffeehouse, the issue is power, okay? There’s a lot of power. [unclear] to be pancho. The only reason we have any respect today at all, power. You don’t have power, you don’t have anything. The reason the gays have been able to move so quickly, so fast, power, and also, of course, there’s both power and conscience. I don’t mean political conscience; I mean doing what’s right.





ESPINO:

They’ve helped us to open our minds to those kinds of things. Anyway, so I’m going to stop it here. [End of July 8, 2013 interview]

Session Six (July 26, 2013)





ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is July 26. I’m interviewing Cruz Becerra at his home in Commerce. I want to start with your involvement in the organization La Junta. Can you give me the date that it started and your role in it and the goals of the organization?





BECERRA:

It was towards the end of the summer of 1968, okay, because I have the disk. I found the disk.





ESPINO:

Oh, that’s right, that’s right.



0:02:220:03:520:06:14

BECERRA:

On the disk it says "Johnny Manuel Parsons, [unclear], Cruz Olmeda, David Torres, and David Salcido." David Salcido was—we called him "Hippie" because he had long hair and a little beard and he played the guitar all the time, singing songs. I don’t know how many times I heard him play "Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao." That’s what he used to sing all the time. This was in July of ’68, this recording here. So what happened, there was a group of us that had left the Berets and we were trying to decide what organization we were going to develop because we were going to be involved, we were going to stay involved. I was listening to part of this recording in July of ’68, which is when we had all left the Berets, and what was really interesting here was the difference that we saw between what was taking place in the Berets and these discussions that we were having with Stan Steiner.

The same way that we had started in the Berets discussing what was taking place in the Chicano community, what was needed, trying to deal with the issues and how we were going to move the issues forward and how we wanted to change the character of the Chicano Movement, our influence on the Chicano Movement, and the question of what role the Brown Beret uniform and the attitude, the stands that we were taking, what effect they were going to have on the Chicano Movement and the polarizing effect that it would have, those types of issues, that was taking place, like, in December and January, December of ’67, January of ’68.

And then six months later or seven months later in July, we’re not in the Berets anymore and we’re having the same discussions again, okay, basically the same group of us, more or less, not everybody, because some guys stayed in the Berets, but of the original guys, yeah, we’re talking again and we’re trying to deal with issues again. Even though, when I listened to it, they were very, like, primitive in terms of our thinking, we were, like, twenty-two years old, you know, twenty-three years old and we had no college education, so we had nothing, and we weren’t studied people, you know, educated people, so we had to deal with the world as we saw it. What interested me so much in this was how we were thinking. We were thinking, okay. That was the first issue, that we were thinking and thinking and thinking things through, which we didn’t really feel free to do so much in the Berets, because in the Berets there was this anti-Communist perspective, okay, and anti-Socialist perspective, and so that would kind of restrict you in your ability to think analytically, to think questions through.

So in the Berets, we would always be going as tactics, as process of one tactic after another tactic, you know, one crisis after another crisis. It would never be a question of one issue after another issue. It would never be a question of laying out a program. Even though we didn’t understand some of those things at the time, we did understand it in a basic sense, so in La Junta we had to start dealing with these issues again. We came to some decisions. One, okay, we’re still militants. We’re still militant Chicano nationalists, although we were revolutionary nationalists, not narrow nationalists like some of the other people were, and so that meant that whatever we did would take on that aspect, that perspective. And we were talking with other people who were in gangs, "Little John," for example, John Sermeno, and then David Torres’ brother, even though his brother was from Maravilla, from El Hoyo Mara, you know, long-time El Hoyo Mara.

So we were just talking with these guys and that’s when we decided that La Junta would organize gang members, and that’s what we did, we started organizing gang members. We were never a part of any gang. We only dealt with the leadership of the gangs. We had meetings with the gang members and the leadership of the gangs all over the Eastside. And then those guys would go out, those gang members would go out and meet with other gang members, and most of their meetings would take place in jail, where you’re in an environment where different gangs come together and they could talk about killing each other. That’s where they would discuss La Junta, and then other guys would go in there. By the time they would come out, they said, "Damn, everybody at the county, they’re all claiming La Junta," because the concept of not kill each other, but to take on the system, take on the issues that we were presenting.

The biggest one was the issue of the police because these guys were constantly hounded by the police. I mean, they had come up with ideas that they wanted to retaliate against the police on their own. They didn’t need La Junta to come up with those ideas, you know, how you take them on, and that’s what we did in La Junta was— [recorder turned off]





ESPINO:

Okay. We’re back. You were explaining to me what the goals of La Junta was and you were talking about the work with gang members, but before we go back to that, I was wondering if you could explain the difference between a revolutionary nationalist and a narrow nationalist, because you said that there were some of these two different kinds of nationalists at that time and that you guys in La Junta were revolutionary nationalists. Is that how you would describe—





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

So what’s the difference between those two?



0:07:45

BECERRA:

Okay, the revolutionary nationalists were very narrow in their perspective and their views. To them, everything was for Chicanos. Everything had to be for Chicanos and everything had to be put into that context. If you were opposed to the war in Vietnam, you would oppose it because it was a white man’s war and there were people over there killing for the white man. They would be very reactionary in every other issue, also, the women question in particular, and they were very, very narrow in their perspective of everything.

The revolutionary nationalists were different. The revolutionary nationalists had an international perspective, okay. The Vietnamese were our sisters and brothers. We were solidarity with the Vietnamese. We saw ourselves as also—we could see the struggles in Latin America and throughout the world as part of our struggle. We weren’t Communists; we were revolutionary nationalists and we had this sense of solidarity with revolutionaries all over the world. The narrow nationalists saw it only as a struggle for Chicanos, of Chicanos, for Chicanos, and that was it. Sometimes they’d go beyond that, but not much. And if you were going to see it—though I think the most blatant thing they did was their attitude towards women, okay. That was the thing because, I mean, it’s bad enough when they would say stuff, they didn’t care about anybody else. That was bad enough, but then that also meant they didn’t care about women either, Chicano women, or they saw them as, "Yeah, it’s our job to protect them. We’re going to protect our women," that kind of an attitude, right. Those were the revolutionary nationalists and those were our differences.





ESPINO:

Those were the narrow nationalists or the revolutionary nationalists?





BECERRA:

The narrow nationalists were the ones who had problems with women and had problems with anybody else who was not a Chicano. Those are the narrow nationalists. The revolutionary nationalists were the ones that had a broad perspective, maybe even be Socialists, but the program was still revolutionary nationalism.





ESPINO:

Do you have any examples of organizations or individuals who made up the narrow nationalists? [Becerra laughs.] You don’t have to name names if you don’t want to, but maybe some groups or some generalities or some examples where you witnessed their behavior.





BECERRA:

Let me put it this way. Generally, people that were anti-Socialists, anti-Communists and anti-Socialists, were generally going to be the narrow nationalists. They would go beyond—they weren’t always confined. They would maybe go a little bit beyond, like solidarity with African Americans at times with some, but then, you know, making distinctions within the black liberation struggle and still supporting the black liberation struggle, maybe only supporting the Black Panthers, things like that.





ESPINO:

So also you mentioned when you were talking about the early formation of La Junta that you had simple—I’m not sure you used that word, but simple ideas as young twenty-one, not formally educated. But what would those ideas—were you talking about bread-and-butter issues or were you talking about the kind of change that you wanted to work for?



0:11:32

BECERRA:

No. One was the kind of change that we wanted, but also it was dealing with the national question, how we viewed the national question, the question of territory, how were we going to address that, the question of secession, of independence, the roles of different races, nationalities, ethnicities within a liberated region, whether it’s federated or independent, whatever. At no time would we ever consider reunification with Mexico, at no time. It was always a question of either a federated relationship or independence.

So those kinds of issues we were taking up then and we’d carry them into the future. Those issues had been there for a long time, for 150, 160 years. So those are the types of issues. We didn’t deal with every issue. We would not deal with, say, with the women’s issue because there were no women around us, you know, and it wasn’t like a practical issue for us because we were not involved with feminists, because Chicana feminists, if they existed, a lot of the Chicanos really didn’t like the feminists because they were white and they saw them as white, they saw them as racist, they saw them as causing divisions in the Chicano Movement because they didn’t understand us. So we were dealing with issues of women, just the national question, the question of politics, because we were still going to be supporting reformist politics, politicians, and in spite of having a revolution perspective, we still support them. We would be involved in campaigns, political campaigns for progressive candidates. Those were the issues that we were discussing.





ESPINO:

Well, when you talk about the national question, was that something that emerged during your time in the Brown Berets or did you start studying that after you left?



0:15:12

BECERRA:

In the Brown Berets we would talk about it, but we’d never really discuss it, okay. I’m talking about in’68, early ’68. What happened after that is something else, but at that time, no, we hardly discussed it at all. My first introduction to the national question as a national question happened in that summer of ’68, or maybe it may have been going into ’69, but I think it was ’68, maybe. I was invited to the home of Delfino Varela. Delfino Varela was a member of the Communist Party, and I went there with some of the guys from La Junta. I think I told you this before. He had someone there from the party who gave us a presentation of the national question. He gave us a presentation of the national question based on Stalin’s writings. The book is called The National Question by Stalin. He had written it around 1907, maybe, and he explained to us the Communist Party’s position that based on Stalin’s writings, Chicanos did not constitute a nation, okay.

We didn’t understand why he was telling us this. Even if he was the guy to deal with the national question on the part of the party, he was not schooled in it at all, and it wouldn’t be till years later that we’d understand that. He was dealing with Stalin in 1907 when he talked about—some people refer to it as the five criteria, but that’s not what it is. What it is is the five characteristics in the development of Western capitalist countries, Western Europe, like Britain and France and Germany. And what he said was there was a people with a common history and a common territory, language, economy, culture, and territory, so everybody was running around trying to find out if Chicanos qualified, right, as if that was the basis for it.

It had nothing to do with the Chicano national question, but people didn’t understand that. Lenin wrote about the national question afterwards and he writes about it around 1919, I think, and he kept writing about it. He wrote about it for about thirty years; he didn’t stop. What he did was he changed the issue. It had to deal with why was there no revolution in Western Europe like there was supposed to be, and why was revolution taking place somewhere else. So he makes an analysis of imperialism and he lays out different characteristics of imperialism and he says, "Therefore, from that we can conclude the following," one of which was the national question. He said, "The revolution will not take place in advanced capitalist countries. It will take place wherever the chain of imperialism is the weakest," which means that the nationalities and the colonies, that the— [interruption]



0:17:11

BECERRA:

Which will mean that the nationalities and the colonies, the colonial people may be the most to lead the struggle for socialism, and not the people in the capitalist countries. That’s what was happening, and he spoke about it. He even addressed the issue in different meetings at the international conferences. And then Stalin took it even further, much further, and Stalin said that whereas before it was up to the national bourgeois class to lead the struggle, well, that was no longer—for an example, that would be Sun Yat-sen in China and, later on, Chiang Kai-shek. And Stalin said, "But that is no longer the case. Now they’ll sell out like Chiang Kai-shek, for example. They’ll sell out. It’s up to the Communists to pick up the banner of national liberation and carry it forward."

Okay, none of this—that member of the Communist Party who was trying to teach us about the national question, he didn’t know any of this stuff and he was there representing the party on the national question and he didn’t know anything about this, the question of territory, question of boundaries, of borders, all those issues, you know. Nothing, he knew nothing about it. So for us, you know, the question of whether or not the oppressed people are inside of a given state or outside of that state on another continent doesn’t matter. The issue is the same, the question of the democratic right to either self-determination, which means independence, or whether it’s a federated relationship of some type or regional autonomy, whatever it is. The member of the Communist Party would talk to us. They’d teach us that.

He was still stuck with Stalin’s writings of 1907, which Stalin rejected. He said that’s obsolete. Lenin said it was obsolete. Stalin said it was obsolete. You can’t go on the basis of those writings anymore. This man had never read that. I can see why the Communist Party was so far behind while the black liberation struggle surged forward. Then the Black Panthers and all the revolutionary aspects of the black liberation struggle and the Chicano National Movements moved forward. The party was caught off guard, okay. The Trotskyites were caught off guard. They didn’t know how to deal with it. When I say Trotskyites, I’m talking about the Socialist Workers Party. The Socialist Workers Party can adapt real quickly. [laughs] They were flexible, but only in form, only in form. The party was caught way off guard and they never caught up. They never caught up.





ESPINO:

Do you know how long Del Varela was in the Communist Party?





BECERRA:

Del Varela, I talked to him one time, and he addressed a conference of the Communist Party back east and he wanted me to take the position on the Chicano national question. He had a position that he presented, right, at the national conference of the Communist Party, and it was modest. What he said was that this national question was different from other issues, from the black liberation struggle and from the question of immigrants, because the party was looking at it as just a question of immigrants. He said, "No one said there’s a question of territory, question of land," and he wanted that to be voted on. The party was not going to pass it and the party was going to look really, really bad if it didn’t pass that, so they put a lot of pressure on Delfino Varela to withdraw that resolution, okay. So he withdrew it, and then afterwards he told me that Chicano members of the Communist Party [unclear] good, good for the unity of the party, for the unity of the party. He says he wanted to spit on them, he was so pissed off, because he said, "These are the people that don’t have any balls to fight for these issues," and he quit the party. He left the party. I don’t know when. By the eighties I remember—





ESPINO:

So this was in the seventies that you’re talking about when he gave his presentation?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

But you don’t know how long he had been in the Communist Party?





BECERRA:

No, but he’d been there for a while, maybe even when he lived in New Mexico. He may have been in the party in New Mexico.





ESPINO:

In the fifties?





BECERRA:

Yeah, but for sure once he was here he was in the party.





ESPINO:

Because he’s well known for his work with immigration.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Not as a Chicano Movement activist.





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

So how would you describe his role or his legacy?





BECERRA:

I remember Delfino for a number of things. One, his work on immigration, immigration and educating people around the issue of immigration, even the Communist Party. [telephone interruption]



0:21:45

BECERRA:

Even the party on the question of immigration, because the party did do important work on the question of immigration, and I remember him also for raising the issue in the eighties in the Communist Party on the Chicano national question. Even though he lost, he fought for it.

Later he quit. I don’t know where he went, but I know that one of the leaders of the League did have meetings with him. He used to [unclear]. He must have been close to the League later, the League for Revolutionary Struggle. But to me, he was an activist on the Eastside. He was involved with MAPA 40, he was involved with all the political issues of the Eastside, but he was not—how would you say it? Remember, these were party members that had gone through the McCarthy era, through the Smith Act. They were not going to be like us. We were younger. We had not really had that experience. We were not scared, because we were too young and too dumb to be scared, really. But these people had to be careful. No, I’ll always remember Delfino for those things and you respect him for those things too.





ESPINO:

Did he have a role in La Junta? [recorder turned off]





ESPINO:

Okay. So you were going to tell me if Del Varela had a role in the formation of La Junta.





BECERRA:

No. No, he didn’t. We would talk to him, but I don’t think we ever talked to him enough, because he had a lot of history, a lot of things he could teach us. But we didn’t talk to him enough.





ESPINO:

What about Bert Corona? Because he was also involved with immigration issues. He was one of those older Chicano activists who didn’t come of age during the Chicano Movement. He was already in his late thirties, possibly, in the sixties.





BECERRA:

Oh, he was older than that.





ESPINO:

Forties, maybe?





BECERRA:

Well, look, in the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War, he was in college, so—





ESPINO:

Bert Corona?





BECERRA:

Bert Corona, yeah, and he was raising funds for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting in the Spanish Civil War.





ESPINO:

So he was already in his sixties or seventies? Well, 1942, he was in the military.





BECERRA:

Yes. I believe he was in the merchant marine.





ESPINO:

Yeah. Maybe fifties. Maybe he was in his fifties. But anyway, the point is, is that did you come in contact with Bert Corona after you left the Brown Berets while you were starting to develop more of a revolutionary nationalist perspective?



0:24:480:26:42

BECERRA:

Yes. He had no influence on us when we saw him, because we would go to the same meetings, the same rallies. We would accompany him when he would be up here on television speaking on Chicano issues. We would show up in the studios, because he was on television and we’d show up at the studios to support him.

He knew other people, too, like Corky and everybody who was involved in—all the leaders at the movement at the time. He was well respected as a spokesman and a representative of the Chicano Movement. So I had a lot of respect for him as an elder, you know, and somebody who really spoke—you were proud to have him speaking for you, representing Chicanos. Then we didn’t run into him again until 1972, ’71, ‘72, ’73, and that’s when he had formed CASA, Centro de Acción Social Autónoma, over on the Westside and he was doing work on immigration, and people would go there and they would have labor issues of different types. They got fired or were injured on the job, so he would send the people to us.

We were the Labor Committee of La Raza Unida Party and we had our headquarters on Wheeler and—it was, like, Wheeler and I think Chicago, Wheeler and Chicago. We were on the corner. So he would send people there, and sometimes we would be happy to meet the people. Sometimes we would say, "What’s Bert doing?" Did I talk about El Mormón? His name is Antonio Rodriguez. He was from Mexico and he spoke very little English, but he had been recruited by the Mormons in Mexico. So when we met him, we found out that he was a Mormon, so nobody knew his name afterward because everybody called him El Mormón, and that stuck. [laughs] That stuck with him for life, you know, El Mormón. In fact, he lives in Bell.

When the scandal broke out in Bell, he was at a City Council meeting when he ran into one of the guys that worked with us, who’s still a friend of mine, Doug Marshall. And Doug Marshall told me, "You know what? I saw Antonio Rodriguez." I said, "Yeah?" He says, "He remembers you. He wanted to say hi. He wants you to call him," and he gave me his phone number. But I thought Antonio Rodriguez was the one that we know, right, the lawyer. But no. I said, "The lawyer?" He said, "No, the other. Don’t you remember from the Labor Committee?" I said, "No." And this went on for like six months, eight months, and they started talking to me about him. I said, "Oh, El Mormón." [laughs]





ESPINO:

Funny.





BECERRA:

Because I didn’t know him by his name.





ESPINO:

Yeah, that’s kind of a bit of a jump from—



0:27:52

BECERRA:

Yeah, but El Mormón came to our office at the Labor Committee and he said, "I want to talk to Bert. I paid my money for the stuff," the papers that they give you there and all that." He says, "And I told them that I lost my job. I want help getting a job." And Bert told him, "No, no, no. Nosotros no nos ocupamos con eso. Mira, vete alla con los muchachos del Labor Committee. Ellos estan encargados de piquetear." [laughs]

And we had people coming in like that all the time from CASA. This is before the Rodriguez brothers were involved with CASA. This is before that. Women would come in injured, like, from the sewing machine accidents. One woman was putting rivets on jeans and she stuck her thumb in, and the rivet went right through her thumb. So she came over to us with her hand wrapped up in a handkerchief. These were people coming in from Bert’s organization and we were dealing with those kinds of issues. So then that was the second time that I ran into Bert, okay, and then after that I didn’t see Bert anymore, but I know that Bert contributed immensely to the movement from the thirties, the forties, the fifties, everything from the [unclear] case, everything, all the way through till the day he died. He was always involved, training a lot of political leaders and organizing. But my own personal contact with him was limited to seeing him at meetings. I wasn’t trained by Bert and I did not work with Bert.





ESPINO:

He wasn’t the same kind of advocate that Del Varela was, as far as having house parties of political education on the national question? [unclear].





BECERRA:

No. Bert Corona’s teachings on issues, where they took place was he became a professor at Cal State L.A. and he used to teach there, and that’s where he would lay out his views, his political views, in the Chicano Studies classes.





ESPINO:

Did you ever take any of those?





BECERRA:

No, but I was there for one and I liked it. It was very, very good. Because Bert knew a lot. Man, he knew a lot, not just from experiences, but also from reading and studying. I mean, that man knew a lot. To meet with him and really have a long talk, you would really be impressed with Bert Corona.





ESPINO:

So how long did La Junta last and what was your biggest impact, do you think?





BECERRA:

The biggest impact, I didn’t see it, other people saw it and the police saw it, too, was with the gang violence in that period, that one year. Gangs shooting each other went down, I mean really down almost to zero, and the cops were pissed. [unclear] would arrest people and say—but I can remember dragging [unclear]. Vampire, the guy’s name was Vampire, and I forget his real name, but he was being arrested one time, and they criticized La Junta. He says, "Yeah, but you notice there’s no more gang fighting. They’re not killing each other anymore." And the cops knew that was true and they were pissed. But remember, that was a different police department than what we have today, you know. Today they would be happy that there’s no gang violence. [laughs]





ESPINO:

Right. It’s true. Well, how difficult was it or how easy was it to organize gang members?



0:31:33

BECERRA:

It wasn’t hard, because you always knew somebody who knew somebody, you know, and you didn’t go talk to people when they were getting high at night. You went to meet with them during the day, you know, and you would meet with the leadership of different groups, different gangs. It’s not like it is today. Today, Jesus, it’s really, really bad. It wasn’t that bad in those days, and you would meet with them and would exchange ideas.

They didn’t join La Junta. Some of their members did, but they didn’t join La Junta. More than anything, we influenced them, influenced their attitudes towards each other, towards the movement, towards Chicanos, towards other gang members. That’s what we were doing, and, amazingly, it was very, very successful, or what everybody else told us, because we were not recruiting people, because we had a group of people, the group, you know, and that was it. We were not going to try and build a little empire. That’s not what we were trying to do.





ESPINO:

An army?





BECERRA:

Yeah. We were not trying to do that.





ESPINO:

You weren’t building an army.





BECERRA:

No. No, that’s not what we were trying to do at all.





ESPINO:

What were you trying to do?





BECERRA:

Influence the young people, influence the gang members and to politicize them, influence their attitudes politically towards the Chicano Movement, towards the police, which they already knew. We didn’t have to teach anything about that, and their attitude towards other gangs. They were raza. They were brothers, but not doing it like missionaries, because that’s not going to work. We weren’t there to talk like priests, not do it in a militant way. If they’re not going to be the—[unclear] going to be the enemy, okay, because that was important. You can’t turn these guys into pacifists. They were not pacifists. All we had to do is just turn their aggression, the anger, and everything in a different direction and that’s what we were doing. And we were successful in doing that while we were active.





ESPINO:

Okay. So then was it just a question of education and raising consciousness?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

What about job opportunity or going back to school or degrees or political involvement?





BECERRA:

No. No, we were not like a service agency. [laughs] We were revolutionaries.





ESPINO:

Well what did you hope to achieve?





BECERRA:

We did.





ESPINO:

Did you have an end goal?





BECERRA:

Yeah, that. That was the—





ESPINO:

Just that?





BECERRA:

That was it. That was it, yeah.





ESPINO:

And then how come it ended?





BECERRA:

I forget. I forget, but it ended.





ESPINO:

And then what happened after that? So then that lasted ’68?





BECERRA:

No, ’69.





ESPINO:

Till ’69?





BECERRA:

Yeah, and then I wasn’t active anymore until 1971, ’72, around that period.





ESPINO:

What were you doing?





BECERRA:

Nothing. Just working. Just working.





ESPINO:

Is that the time that you were married?





BECERRA:

Yes. I was not making any babies, but I was married. [laughs]





ESPINO:

I won’t say anything, because that will go on a whole other tangent. [laughs] Okay, so you were working. And then how did you start up again? I mean, did you feel good about not being involved? What did that feel like?



0:35:30

BECERRA:

I didn’t feel good about not being involved. I started going to school at Cal State L.A. and I was working full-time. No, no, I did not do both things at the same time, but I did go to the moratorium march in 1970 with my friends here, tried to get guys from work. I was working in the oil refinery then, tried to get people to go. I think one guy did try to go, but he couldn’t get in because by then everything was blocked off. The cops had blocked the whole area out. But what happened was that I ran into Jimmy Franco, and Jimmy Franco, I’d met him when we were working with Victor Franco—there’s no relation—when he was putting out the magazine Inside Eastside. We had met and then we met again and we started talking and we decided we were going to get a group of people together to start organizing. What had happened was we were both influenced very much by something that had just taken place, and that was the wildcat strike of the Teamsters and the wildcat strike of the postal workers. We saw how powerful those strikes were in just bringing the country to a complete stop.

The things that we understood about Marx, but now we understood in a practical way, because during this period of time I was meeting with some Marxists, going to meetings, you know. They’re giving me stuff to read during that time, so I was reading a little bit, studying a little bit, getting more familiar with the writings of Marx, but the basic writings that were for the working-class, not his theoretical, philosophical works. So we decided to form what would become the Labor Committee. He got some people together that he knew from the university, I got some people together, workers that I knew, friends of mine that were workers, and we came together. We formed what became the Labor Committee of La Raza Unida Party, which later became the August 29th Movement, okay, which later became the League for Revolutionary Struggle. It would merge into, become the League for Revolutionary Struggle.





ESPINO:

Before we get into that evolution, can you tell me what you remember from August 29th? Was that the first antiwar march you participated in?





BECERRA:

No, but it was the biggest. I had gone to two other ones and I would go to ones after that, too, but it was the biggest Chicano one and probably the biggest one, period, because I’d only gone to marches here in L.A.





ESPINO:

What was the first one that you went to?





BECERRA:

I can’t remember. I can’t remember at all. In fact, this one may even be the first one, but I can’t remember.





ESPINO:

Okay, because there were those—the march in the rain. That was documented.





BECERRA:

Yes, I didn’t go to that one.





ESPINO:

And then there’s the antiwar march that wasn’t organized by Rosalio and the Chicano Movement activists; it was organized by the Resistance, which were white antiwar activists on the Westside.





BECERRA:

I don’t know if [unclear].





ESPINO:

They had a big march downtown.





BECERRA:

I can’t remember if I went to that one. But, no, I was at the August 29th, 1971, yeah, I was there.





ESPINO:

That one stands out most in your memory?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes.





ESPINO:

Can you tell me about that day? Or how did you hear about it?





BECERRA:

Oh, everybody heard about it. Everybody knew. Yeah, everybody knew. I had called some friends and we all went together. I was with my wife. I can’t remember if we were married yet. We were living together, but I can’t remember if we were married. I went with Rolando, with Tino, with Neto, with Net, and we were marching. [unclear], remember. Like Rolando, he was from El Salvador. He was from the upper-middle-class of El Salvador. His whole family was left-wing. Over there, he went to a private school and he was in school, the middle school, when Nixon visited. It was his famous trip to Latin America. He visited El Salvador, visited at that school and shook hands with the students [unclear] when Nixon was vice president under Eisenhower. His family is progressive. I won’t go into that. That’s something else, but very, very progressive. Rolando was there and [unclear] was there.





ESPINO:

Rolando?



0:40:220:41:49

BECERRA:

Rolando Menjivar. Rolando was a Vietnam veteran, very antiwar. Even when he was there, he was antiwar because when they would send us out on patrol, we’d go out of the way, sit down, roll up a joint, smoke, and say, "Fuck it. I’m not getting out there and getting killed." Well, at this march I remember because Rolando, he had his own chant. He was chanting, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NFL is going to win." There was none of the "Peace now," "Give peace a chance." No, no, no. That was his chant, and then there was the other chants. I can’t remember them exactly, but there was like, "Vietnam, Aztlán, same struggle, two fronts." That’s the revolutionary nationalist perspective that I talked about.

I remember we were marching, we’re drinking wine, getting high and stuff, and then we sat down at the park to see the program, and then I wanted to go get something from the store and when I went I said, "Damn." There was like a little riot going on there, and so I walked up. And then pretty soon here comes the cops, man, all kinds of cops coming. [laughs] I said, "Chingao." So I ran to tell everybody, "What the hell? Cops, they’re charging. There’s a riot here," and to get everybody out of there, right?

So then we started going east on Whittier Boulevard away from the park, and then I blew it. Something snapped in my head. I blew it, and so I just started getting bottles and throwing them at the cop cars, right, and my wife tried to get me out of there. I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no. This has built up too long. I’m going to do it now." So I remember going behind—it was either a liquor store or a bar, and they used to save the cases of beer bottles. I guess they used to return them. When they’d come to deliver beer, they’d take the empties, right, and I saw a whole case of beer bottles. So I picked them up and I took them to the sidewalk and I got two or three bottles and I walked out in the middle of the street.

All the sheriffs was just zooming down the street. They had reinforcements at the park, so I don’t know where these sheriffs were, but they were just coming in a convoy, wham, wham, one cop car after another. So I was fucked up by then, you know, so I just stood in the middle of the street, and as they were coming down, I threw a bottle through the windshield, one car after another. But I would look at them, and the cops had these really scared, scared looks on their faces, right, because they didn’t know what they were walking into. And then they were seeing the cop cars coming in the other direction, and those cop cars were full of injured cops. Cops are, you know, all fucked up because they were getting their asses kicked, right?

So then I’d run and get some more bottles and keep it up. And then during one of those times when I turned around to go get some more bottles, that cop car was coming and he hit me. First he hit me with the fender, and I went back. Then his tire rolled on my foot, and when it rolled on my foot, I came forward again, right? And then when I came forward again, his spotlight hit me in the arm and that knocked me on my ass. Boom. I was out of commission. So some people picked me up and they carried me to the gas station. Somebody said, "You can come to my house because I live right here," so I went to somebody’s house, and they cut my pants because my legs were all fucked up.

I was off that day, and I couldn’t go back to work because I was injured, and so I had to call up work and tell them I can’t go to work. They all knew that I was there. They all knew that I had invited them all to go, you know, and so they thought maybe I’d been shot, maybe I was in jail. They didn’t know what was going on. And I told them, "No, I got run over." He said, "Did you report them?" I said, "How am I going to report them? I’m throwing bottles at them when they run over me. What the hell? I can’t report something like that." But, yeah, that was my day, August 29th.





ESPINO:

So when you headed out to go there, what were you thinking it was going to be like? Were you expecting a peaceful demonstration with music and poetry?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Or were you expecting police and protestor confronting? Were you expecting an angry mob?





BECERRA:

No. You know, a lot of times when I go to demonstrations like that, you’re going to go there and you’re going to have fun, you know. You’re going to sit there, you’re going to drink, you’re going to talk with people. There’s going to be people with posters and all kinds of stuff that they’re selling and there’s going to be speeches. There’s going to be entertainment. It’s like a festival more than a protest, you know. That’s the way Chicano rallies are, you know, and that’s what I was expecting. I didn’t expect the cops to attack everybody, no, not at all, you know, not at all. I mean, it just blew me away when it happened, but I reacted quickly. I said, "Fuck it. That’s it. Get it on."





ESPINO:

Was that first time that you reacted that way in public?





BECERRA:

In public, yes, yes. Yeah, but it just built up too long, too many years building up like that. It was enough. That was it. [laughs]





ESPINO:

So were you ready to get arrested or—I mean, I don’t know if it’s too extreme to say, but were you ready to die at that moment?





BECERRA:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was it. [laughs] That was it, yeah. Everything had built up till that moment. Yeah. Hell, yeah.





ESPINO:

What did it represent to you then?





BECERRA:

[cries] Everything that had built up to that moment, growing up, the navy, the movement, all the struggles. Everything had built up to that moment, and when the moment was there, I was going to react. I wasn’t going to walk away from it. I wasn’t going to—I mean, people react differently, you know. I didn’t have any children in daycare. I would have reacted much, much different—I would have ran in there to get the kids out, protect the kids, you know, but that wasn’t where I was. I had no children, you know, and I still saw myself as a soldier, you know. That’s the way I reacted.





ESPINO:

You mean a soldier like when you were a soldier—





BECERRA:

A revolutionary.





ESPINO:

Not a U.S.—





BECERRA:

No. No, no.





ESPINO:

You mean like a Brown Beret soldier?





BECERRA:

Yes, yes. Yeah, that was it.





ESPINO:

So when you heard about the death of Ruben Salazar, did you have any theories about that? Because it sounds like—you’re the first person that I talked to that actually says, "Yes, I threw something. Yes, I responded with violence back." Well, maybe a couple of other people have said that, but most people focus on what happened to Ruben Salazar and the whole conspiracy theory around was he murdered or was he a victim of this bullet that came in unknowingly, this officer shot unknowingly into this bar, you know, that story. Was that important to you, that part of the march that occurred that day?





BECERRA:

Yeah. What happened, I’d seen Ruben Salazar. I had met him and seen him at meetings, right, and I knew he was a good guy, and he was really growing as a person, was really, really growing. He hung out with Sam Kushner, right, a lot, and that’s why I think that it wasn’t an accident, because he had started to represent something real, okay, like a real threat. And it’s okay if you have people—see, the role of Salazar, even though his writings were not the most militant— [interruption]





ESPINO:

Okay, if you could just repeat that last statement.



0:49:16

BECERRA:

I saw then his role is much more significant than I saw at the time, even maybe today. But even though his writings were not for the militants, they were geared towards the Anglos and trying to prepare, like, the environment in which we were going to be struggling and also for the more moderate Chicanos that were not radicals, and trying to get them to understand what was taking place in front of them. I mean, guys like Roybal needed that kind of education, but they really praised Roybal and I don’t think he deserved any of it myself. They say he was the first this or the first that, but, you know, it doesn’t matter, you know. I saw him as repairing the environment in which we were struggling and bringing along some of our people who were not as militant. And I know that he was, like, restricted, how much he could do, how much he could say as a columnist for the L.A. Times, but he was still doing a good job.

He could understand what people were feeling because he was part of the community again and he would try to put that into his writings, but they had to be in a certain way that you were going to be able to write that. Otherwise, it doesn’t get written. But issues, he was raising the issues. He was raising the issues that were important in the community, and I think somebody saw him as dangerous, as a dangerous spokesman because he did have standing in the community, standing in the media, you know, and people like that are dangerous, very dangerous, when they stand with the people, and that’s why I think some—you know, it wasn’t—I don’t see how—I think the guy did shoot in there and I think that if he hadn’t killed him then, they would have killed him later.

It’s very hard to—I mean, the guy walked almost up to the door, and, yeah, there was a curtain there. I can’t remember if he actually stepped inside to shoot or if he shot from the outside and he could see inside. It’s hard to tell because the bars are dark and you’re out of the sunlight, but he did know that Salazar was in there. So that could have been a lucky shot that he got, but if they hadn’t killed him then, it would happen later. Some people did not represent the threat, as big of a threat, or some people—Chavez did not represent that kind of a threat, but guys like Salazar did.





ESPINO:

So what impact did it have on you when you heard? Do you remember what you thought when you heard that he had been killed?





BECERRA:

I was pissed. I wasn’t, like, sad, you know. I was pissed because, you know, to me, they killed him. That was it. They just killed him, and the particular circumstances, [unclear] to kill him. And there’s still a lot of stuff that’s still covered up that’s not released yet, but I think it would show that there were cops already on the way. They already knew he was in there. There were already cops on the way, and if they hadn’t got him, you know, in there, they would have got him coming out.

Remember, the cops had their own secret groupings, their own secret paramilitary groupings, you know, organizations, and all the police departments had them, especially the rotten ones like the sheriff’s department. They had them. Sometimes it comes out, they called themselves the Vikings or they’re called different things, right, and they give themselves points for how many people you beat up or stuff like that. I mean, that comes out in the L.A. Times, but this was in a period that was even worse, okay. So if they hadn’t killed him in the bar, they could have killed him coming out of the bar, and the cops were already on their way there, so, you know, to me, they killed him. They just killed him, and I don’t think—it’s too much coincidence for it to have been an accident.





ESPINO:

So I know you were out of commission because of what happened, but how did you respond to that as an activist, as a community member? How did you respond to that violence, I mean the arrests and these—well, there were other people who were killed, too, not just Ruben Salazar.



0:55:01

BECERRA:

Yeah, sure. No, there were more marches, and I went to one more march and then I stopped going to them. My reaction, because this was in August of 1970, my reaction became—how would I say it? It culminated in the meeting with Jimmy Franco when we decided that we—we saw what had happened and there were more marches, like in September, maybe, and January. More and more people were shot, you know, and then, of course, different people reacted in different ways maybe. One group that we wrote about before—we didn’t write about the group, but one of the reactions that we saw coming out of that would have been the development of the Chicano Liberation Front, and we didn’t go in that direction. I met with Jimmy and we went in a different direction, forming the Labor Committee, which became the ATM, and moving in that direction.

So that was like a direct consequence of what happened with Salazar and the marches that happened afterwards, and the cops were shooting at us, that we had to figure, "Okay, you know what? We’ve got to do something about this. How are we going to deal with this?" And we decided that becoming Marxist-Leninist was the way we were going to deal with it and organizing as Marxists-Leninists and having to learn it, because we didn’t know crap. But we knew that other revolutionaries were Marxist-Leninist in China, in Vietnam, in Cuba, so we knew that these were the people we admired. These were the people who had been successful in a revolutionary struggle, and we were going to become Marxists-Leninists. We were going to study it because we knew that we were anti-imperialists, at least, which is not a big deal, because, remember, Mark Twain was an anti-imperialist and he was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, the American Anti-Imperialist League.

But that’s when we knew that we were anti-imperialists and we were going to organize a Marxist-Leninist organization and we had to study and we had to get the experience, which we got in the August 29th Movement, a lot of experience, really, really, I mean a lot of experience under a lot of pressure, you know, because we were organizing strikes and leading strikes. These were wildcat strikes. [telephone interruption]





BECERRA:

So, like, that came directly from that experience of August—in fact, we called ourselves the August 29th Movement. Everybody came directly from that experience of what happened that day.





ESPINO:

So the August 29th comes from that?





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

So would you say that the repression of that march was more impactful than the walkouts, than the repression of the walkouts, in helping you to form your—





BECERRA:

Oh, as an individual, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I saw the impact that the walkouts had, okay, and I saw the impact that they had on me, in helping me understand what we were capable of doing, okay, as a people. The moratorium had that impact also, but also when it turned out the way that it turned out, yeah, because then from that point forward, I mean, killing people in marches, one march, more shootings after being on the subsequent marches, it was crazy, you know. So you had to stop and figure out, okay, what are you going to do? So, yeah, in that way, yes.





ESPINO:

Is that what also led you to participate in the La Raza Unida Party?





BECERRA:

Yes. When we went into the La Raza Unida Party, we were already going in there— [interruption]





BECERRA:

When we were going to La Raza Unida, we were already going in as Socialists. We were already going in as Marxists-Leninists. Now, most of the people in La Raza Unida Party in California, in L.A. and in California, were Socialists. They did not belong to the Communist Party or the Socialist Workers Party or any Socialist organizations or Communist organizations. Their experiences had brought them to that view. And in northern California they formed collectives, Marxist-Leninist collectives, you know, that became part of La Raza Unida Party California. But when we went into La Raza Unida Party, yeah, that was part of what we were going to be doing.





ESPINO:

So how did you get involved in the La Raza Unida Party? Was it someone recruited you or—



0:59:08

BECERRA:

No. In talking with Jimmy Franco and with Rudy Quiñones, okay, we discussed what the activists on the campuses were doing, and La Raza Unida Party was being formed in L.A. County and there were chapters. So we discussed going to La Raza Unida Party Central Committee, L.A. County Central Committee, and telling them that we wanted to organize a chapter, but it would not be a geographical chapter like San Fernando Valley or La Puentes or [unclear] chapter or the East L.A. chapter. We wanted a chapter that was going to be a labor chapter organizing workers and it would be the Labor Committee of La Raza Unida Party, and the party was very, very open to that. We would go and have voter registration drives in front of General Motors in Southgate. We set up our tables. Oh, workers just signed up.

So, yeah, they were open to it and they were very happy to see that. Later, they would be very critical of us because they saw that we were not doing as much voter registration as they were doing, okay, as other members were doing, but we did do voter registration. But they were open to us because, remember, these were people who were also Socialists and so they were very much open to the Labor Committee becoming part of La Raza Unida Party.





ESPINO:

What drew you to the idea of a third party, of a political party? I mean, I know you were involved in a couple—like, you mentioned somebody’s election, Calderon, I think it was, who you, as a Brown Beret, did some work for Calderon, who was running—





BECERRA:

Yeah, actually, we didn’t do work for Calderon as much as we did for one of the guys who was running for district attorney, Mike Hammond or Mike something like that. I can’t remember his name.





ESPINO:

Not a Chicano?





BECERRA:

He was not a Chicano, but he was running for district attorney. And remember, we hated Evelle Younger because he indicted us.





ESPINO:

Right.





BECERRA:

So we wanted somebody else and so we supported someone else.





ESPINO:

So what’s your philosophy as a revolutionary nationalist? What’s your philosophy when you look at Democratic politics? Because La Raza Unida was going to fit into the structure of a Democratic politic as a third party within this larger U.S. framework.



1:02:021:03:52

BECERRA:

Okay. It was two things that we saw. One, it was going to be independent of the two other political parties, so it would be an independent political party. Second, it would be a party that was addressing the needs of La Raza, which would be really mainstream issues, you know, for the most part, crime, police issues, education, jobs, but there would be other issues that we’d be dealing with that the other parties were not dealing with, like bilingual education, for example. So we saw it as an independent political party, so it was legitimate to work within that system. Okay. Now, while we were doing this, because there were Latinos and some guys were from Mexico, [unclear] said we should not organize people into the trade unions because we were being Judas-coats, okay, and so we had to stay out of the Labor Movement because the Labor Movement was corrupt, we were being Judas-coats leading our people into these trade unions. So that became one of the first ideological choice that we had in the organization.

But these kinds of issues, ultra-left issues, Lenin had already addressed them. He had written a book called—he called it a pamphlet. It was a book. What I call a book is a chapter. [laughs] Like my little boy says, "It’s a chapter book, Daddy." Dealing with ultra-leftism in the Communist Movement around the world, and just like Marx, he said it was going to be the Latinos who would have a problem with ultra-leftism. Marx had talked about ultra-leftism of the Latinos, specifically the Spanish and the Italians, okay. Lenin would address them primarily, but we had the same problems with the Latinos in Latin America, okay, even during Lenin’s time, same issues. So in that, he talked about the importance of doing [unclear] work. You work with the trade unions. You don’t form an independent movement. You work in the trade unions.

People say you don’t go to parliaments, congresses. These were bourgeois institutions. We don’t work with them. Of course they’re bourgeois institutions. We still work in them. You still have to raise these issues to the people. He went right down the line. So we understood and we had to work within that framework, okay, and in the trade unions. And to us, it make sense anyway. We didn’t have to read Lenin to understand that. We were revolutionaries. In a bourgeois society, in capitalism, the most advanced industrial society in the world, you know, we didn’t have to read Lenin to understand this is what we had to do, and if somebody didn’t like it, well, tough. We understood we had to do this, okay? So we didn’t have a problem with that.

We finally did [unclear]. You know, from a nationalist perspective, because by then we had become Socialists, we were fighting to become Marxist-Leninist, it was a big struggle to understand it, you know. But even as nationalists, with the nationalist background we had, as revolutionary nationalists, this is where our people are stuck. This is where our people are at. This is where we want to be, you know. So it was never an issue as revolutionaries about working within that framework of bourgeois politics. We had to. This is where the story was going to take place, even today.





ESPINO:

So then were there candidates that you supported or was your focus mainly in raising consciousness among the working-class through voter registration, that kind of thing?





BECERRA:

We did voter registration and we did support—by now we could only support La Raza Unida candidates. We could not support Democratic Party candidates anymore. Now we would support La Raza Unida candidates, which would be Raúl Ruíz, for example. He ran. That is who we would be supporting. As far as the issue of revolutionary work, no, we continued that. Within the Labor Committee, we went on to develop the August 29th Movement as an organization, and we were already doing it. We were working, recruiting, leading strikes. We were recruiting people. El Mormón, who I told you about, we recruited him. He was a worker. Then I got him a job where I was working. Even though he was undocumented at that time, it didn’t matter. As long as you could provide phony documents, you got a job, you know. They didn’t have e-Verify.





ESPINO:

Right, right, those days.





BECERRA:

And we recruited other workers, Chicano workers, also, who became leaders in the August 29th Movement and in the League. So, no, we saw our work still to continue, to carry on revolutionary work as Marxists-Leninists and recruiting workers into the organization.





ESPINO:

What did you think of Raúl Ruíz? Did you put your 100 percent support behind him? Did he really symbolize what you wanted to achieve as far as all of your goals of self-determination and awareness of the working-class and the struggle of the working-class?



1:07:56

BECERRA:

We’re talking about 1972, okay? And if you were a candidate of La Raza Unida Party like Raúl was, yes, we backed him 100 percent, absolutely. I’d known Raúl since 1968. I’d known him for four years by 1972. He was doing a lot of photographs. He put out the magazine Blowout. He was an activist, and, yes, to me he had more than enough credentials for me to support him. He didn’t have to agree with us. That wasn’t the issue. La Raza Unida Party really weren’t in there because everybody had to agree with you, you know. We did put forward our views of program and so did the people from northern California. We had our state caucuses and then the conferences, and we came with our views and our program, our resolutions, and it had to be something that everybody agreed to, okay. It can’t be so far out that nobody could agree with them, or so backward that nobody could agree with them.

At one conference where we were preparing for the state convention, one of the artists—we have pictures of him—was so backwards. He said, "You know what? I want to have a big painting for the convention of La Virgen de Guadalupe." I said, "What?" [laughs] [unclear] a room full of—





ESPINO:

Atheists.





BECERRA:

Atheists. Cesar Chavez this and Cesar Chavez that. We had a group of Chicana feminists who were also Socialists, radical Socialists, and they sat there and they really didn’t know how to attack this idea, right? So Jimmy Franco stands up, "No, no. This ain’t gonna work. First of all, why are you putting a virgin up there? What the hell are you telling the women, that they’ve got to be virgins? No." He opposed it. And of course it was, like, unanimously shot down. No. So when I say you couldn’t be so radical that people were not going to unite, you also could not be so backward that people would not unite with you. Because that was a very backward idea to present, so that was shot down. So, no, we had no problems with our candidates. We had a program, resolutions of what we’d stand for.





ESPINO:

What about the incorporation of East Los Angeles? Were you involved in that effort as well?





BECERRA:

No. At that time I was supportive of it, but I was not involved in it, okay. I just thought it was a good idea, we should do it. I don’t feel that way anymore. Today it makes no sense to me to do it anymore, but at the time, yeah, I was in favor of it, but I did not get involved in that.





ESPINO:

You didn’t have a role?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

What about any of the other conventions, like the well-known convention that occurred in Texas? Did you go to those?





BECERRA:

Yes, I was there.





ESPINO:

So what was that experience like? Because I understand it was—you did find a lot of factionalism. So the statement that you just made, it sounds like you did have division, but you managed, as a California La Raza Unida Party, to come together on consensus, but it sounds like from some of the things that I’ve read about the La Raza Unida national, that it wasn’t like that. There was a lot of infighting.



1:12:25

BECERRA:

Okay. First, in California, what I’ve been talking to you about there being active chapters that were involved, before the conference in El Paso, José Ángel Gutiérrez tried to set up fake chapters. He set up fake chapters in other states, okay. So what happened is we got the state—the La Raza Party, we got letters from chapters saying San Diego. "We are the San Diego chapter." We said, "Yeah? Let’s see your minutes of your meetings, okay, if you’re real." Because we knew it was bullshit, you know, bullshit. So we said, "Oh, you got a chapter? Good. Let’s see your minutes." Okay, because if you’re a chapter, you’re obviously meeting, you’re passing a resolution, something. Nada. So all the people that we knew, Gutiérrez was trying to form these chapters in California. We knew they were fake, so we rejected them.

They were not a part of La Raza Party of California, okay, because they wanted to have representation in El Paso. [unclear], a student attending some university in Kansas. Okay, you got a chapter. You got so much votes automatically for having a chapter, right? So that’s the kind of shit that was going on, right? Corky didn’t play that game, okay? [unclear] wasn’t involved in it at all. Anyway, so we get to Texas, and, yeah, there was a big struggle, but we aligned ourselves. California aligned itself with Corky Gonzales, okay, and running for the chairman of the party. We almost won, not quite, but almost won. Corky was impressed because we handled that convention like—even though we were outnumbered, really outnumbered and we didn’t have a chance because it was so stacked with fake delegations and fake everything.

I remember one time Rudy got up to the suite, the hotel suite where Gutiérrez had his headquarters for running the convention, right. He said, "Man, I walked in there, fucking wall-to-wall liquor, man, like it was a bourgeois convention. Goddamn, I can’t believe what I seen." So if you go to see where Corky was, you weren’t going to find that. Corky was a revolutionary nationalist, and Gutiérrez was not. Okay. When it was over and the votes counted and we had lost, Rudy went to the headquarters for Corky there, El Paso, to his people, and he said Corky was fucking impressed with the work that California had done, you know, and he told Rudy, "You know, I don’t know what you guys have got, man, whether it’s your Marxism, Leninism, or socialism or what the hell it is, but you guys did a kick-ass job." He had never seen anything like it, [unclear]. I mean, we had gone through so much shit by then, you know, and so many in the party and in the Labor Movement, that when we got there, we were in our prime. [laughs] We were at the top of our game, you know, so we did a very, very good job. It was stacked against us, but we worked it. We worked the floor, the delegations, the floor, everything, and it was good. It was really good.





ESPINO:

Are you referring to Rudy Acuña?





BECERRA:

No, Rudy Quiñones. Rudy Quiñones. I’ve got pictures of him. Rudy Quiñones.





ESPINO:

Well, there’s a story about some violence, because Corky really wanted—and then Ernesto Vigil writes about Corky Gonzales, and the story is that he wanted to be in the leadership. Like you say you aligned yourself with Corky and his platform, but was there violence against the people who opposed him and were supporting Ángel Gutiérrez? I mean, because there’s some women that say they were threatened, some female delegates. Did you guys put that kind of pressure on people? Did that exist within the La Raza Unida? Because even people here in California talk about guns being pulled on them. Jesus [unclear], a filmmaker, he tells a story about that when he’s making a documentary, that somebody pulled a gun on him because they don’t want him to make this documentary for a mainstream television station like KCET or PBS. So that did happen within California, and I’m wondering if that happened at that convention.





BECERRA:

What happened in California? [unclear]?





ESPINO:

That people took the issue so seriously that at times they threatened violence against those who disagreed with them.





BECERRA:

Not La Raza Unida Party. I didn’t see it in La Raza Unida Party, and I was involved a lot, and I didn’t see that, no. El Paso, I can’t remember if something happened at El Paso, because I remember one confrontation that did become violent, but I can’t remember what the issue was and I can’t remember if it was in El Paso or if it was in California. I know that part of it had to do with a personal issue, okay, more than anything, but I can’t remember what the issue was or anything, and I can’t remember if it was California or Texas where it happened.





ESPINO:

Do you didn’t witness any violence?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

While you were there.





BECERRA:

No violence, no intimidation, nothing like that, nothing like that. If it happened, I didn’t see it, okay? And I was involved quite a bit.





ESPINO:

Did you ever visit Corky Gonzales where he had his organization?





BECERRA:

Only for the Youth Liberation conference there, and then I went a couple of other times, but to have meetings with him—





ESPINO:

Well, I’m just wondering what your impression of him and how he ran things, because people have different viewpoints of his impact. Some people say that his nationalism didn’t allow for what you’re talking about, for solidarity with these other organizations, like he was, I guess—I don’t know, but using your own term, narrow nationalist, he would be defined as, not a revolutionary nationalist.



1:18:28

BECERRA:

I don’t know, and I don’t know what years we would be talking about either. From his speeches, when he spoke, he was critical of the parties, the Democratic and Republican Parties, and the role that they played. I thought he was a revolutionary nationalist. I don’t know, I think, because if you’re going to ask me, for example, on particular issues, I don’t know. I know that they were very supportive of the struggle at Wounded Knee, you know, and running supplies in there. They were nationalists, right? [laughs] [unclear] okay for anybody, you know, any revolutionary to do that, but he did it.

I mean, here’s the thing. People can be critical of him, you know, because maybe he wasn’t—if they’re saying what you’re telling me, that he was too narrow, but goddamn, you know, Corky put his money where—not just [unclear], his life where his mouth was, you know. Sorry. I don’t know how anybody who criticizes him has ever placed themselves in that situation, putting your life on the line time after time, you know, on these issues calling for equality, for democracy, democratic rights for Chicanos. Yeah, you can come back today and say, well, he was never here. So what? So what? You know. He was a revolutionary. He put his life on the line time and again, you know.





ESPINO:

Right. Well, I guess my point is that when you’re looking at the history of it and you’re thinking about the future, and somebody ten years from now is thinking of how to analyze society, are they going to look to the Crusade for Justice as a model?





BECERRA:

No.





ESPINO:

Or are you going to say, well, he wasn’t open to having white folks participate, and that might have been a way he could have expanded. I don’t know. I’m just giving some kind of hypothetical. That’s why I ask.





BECERRA:

Okay, let me tell you. I don’t even think that’s the way it should be looked at. I think it should be looked at—look, this is what he did, this is how he did it, and yet he was limited to only Chicanos and support for these kinds of struggles, okay? If he wanted to work with other people, you know, say at the time, at the time— [interruption]



1:21:171:22:03

BECERRA:

Say at the time, for example, that gays and lesbians were struggling for their rights, okay? I’m sure Corky would not have been for it. I’m sure the Brown Berets would not have been for it. I don’t know if parts of the La Raza Unida Party would not have been for it. You might say, well, that’s where things were at that time for these particular people, okay? But yet there were organizations that would be open to it, all right? So that’s what they were playing in bringing that kind of consciousness to the rest of us who weren’t there yet, you know? And that’s the way I would see it. I would not write an essay on how screwed up they were for not supporting lesbians and gays, because the consciousness just wasn’t there, okay? And that’s just the [unclear].

If they were going on a campaign of hate, a campaign against gays and lesbians or against women’s equality or something, then you’ve got something to talk about, okay? But if the consciousness just isn’t there, it just isn’t there. And, yeah, you can say [unclear]. Sure. But that’s what all I think you can say, unless they were being very repressive towards women, for example, because that’s [unclear] more important than whether or not they had solidarity with the Vietnamese or having a practical way the most practical question was going to be how they treated women, okay, not how they treated Democrats or the Republicans or anybody else. It’s women, okay? Because now we’re talking about how we treat our own people, okay, and that’s going to be the question.

In that regard, I don’t know. I don’t know what happened in the Crusade for Justice, because I was not there. We were united on different issues, but I was not—like around his ideology, I really don’t even know what it was, now that you’re asking. We just organized around different issues in general, in general principles.





ESPINO:

Well, back to the La Raza in California. You mentioned that there were some women.





BECERRA:

Yes.





ESPINO:

Do you remember any names of those who were involved in California?





BECERRA:

Jimmy wrote their names down and he wrote it in one of his blogs about the history of La Raza Unida Party. He wrote down the name of one of the women, and I can’t remember, because—





ESPINO:

Only one?





BECERRA:

Yeah, because I don’t remember all their names, and I don’t know where she was from. Maybe she was from San Jose area. That matters, okay? It’s not a question of whether there were members here in L.A. or in San Francisco or—no. San Jose matters. The reason it matters is because the collective was women, okay? The collective was women members of La Raza Unida Party, from the chapter, and they were progressive women way ahead of everybody else, okay. That’s where that one matters more than any other women’s participation in California. And I know they would have a lot to say, okay. I just don’t know who—I don’t remember their names.





ESPINO:

I think probably asking around, now that you mention that, people will start to—





BECERRA:

And if you want to see a critical view of La Raza Unida Party from women’s perspective, those would be the people to talk to, and you can ask the issues that they raised and stuff like that.





ESPINO:

Right. As far as sexism or—





BECERRA:

Yes. Specifically, let me tell you one issue that I’ll never forget. They made a motion at the state caucus to have parity of men and women in representation at every level, and it was voted down, okay? It was voted down. And everybody who voted it down was embarrassed because those organizations did not have what they felt women that were trained to be in those positions, right? Which is really the wrong view to have, you know, because really the view to have is put them in the positions so they’ll learn the leadership and you’ll find out what qualities they have, what leadership qualities they have. But it’s never going to happen if they’re not put in those positions. So that was voted down, and that, to me, is the only embarrassing low point in our history of La Raza Unida Party in California.





ESPINO:

How did you vote?





BECERRA:

No. No. No. And it was for the same reason everybody else voted, that you were involved, even though there were different chapters and you wanted to have as much influence in the party as you could possibly have, okay, and you want to have the best spokesmen for the positions of your chapter there, to make sure that it got through, okay, and so you put the best people that you had there, and that was the reason.





ESPINO:

But you regret that vote now?





BECERRA:

Yes, because for a whole bunch of reasons. I regret it. I regretted the vote when I did it, okay? [laughs]





ESPINO:

You even knew then?



1:28:001:29:53

BECERRA:

Yeah, that it was wrong. Yes, I knew then. You’ve got a conflict, okay? On the one hand, yeah, the women should be there and you understand it in a very basic way. And then you’ve got a conflict because you feel so strong about these views and you’re such a fanatic about them, and you think you’re the only one or somebody else—who are the people who can get this done, okay, and get this through, you know, and those things come into conflict, you know, and you have to decide at the time which is more important. So even though you vote against the motion, you know, you know you’re doing it for not the best reasons, okay?

Because this was over—this other reason, the equality of women, parity for women, it wasn’t a question of equality; it was a question of parity, okay? And that is a very—how do you call it? It carries a lot of weight, that issue, okay? And so then that’s the conflict. So you vote against that motion and you hate it because—for several reasons. One, this collective of women who raised that issue, you fucking respect them so much, you know. I mean, they’re like—whew! They’re up there. And you’ve got to vote against them, you know. And I’ve got to face them afterwards, you know. Jesus. They tell us, "You’re bullshitters, guys. You guys are bullshitting." And your credibility with them, you know, is going down the tubes, you know.

I remember one time we came back after the conference, and I mean, this is when you see the role of women as a viewpoint totally different from yours, okay? I mean, I think I told you before about this one cop who was a lieutenant and he’s training cops how you’re going to deal with situations on the street. He was at the sheriff’s department. He tells them, "I’d rather have two women standing next to me than ten cops, ten male cops." And you see it like when Rachel Maddow on MSNBC during the primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton, and it was obvious Obama was going to win, but Hillary won’t stop fighting. So these male commentators on MSNBC, especially like—I forget his name, the crazy one, but anyway, they’re saying they attend the death watch of Hillary Clinton, you know, that she wouldn’t give it up, right?

So finally the other guys are saying she should give it up, so [unclear] party before the convention, right? And she should fight it all the way to the convention, take it all the way to the convention. And so they’re really down on Hillary Clinton for not conceding prior to the convention, right? And just uniting the party now instead of carrying on any more primaries against Barack Obama. So Hillary Clinton, off camera, has a meeting with these guys and tells them, "Look, guys. I understand what you’re saying and it makes sense politically, but there’s something you have to understand. What does Hillary Clinton represent to women?" You can’t be getting down on her like that. Women are offended by your attitude towards her as a woman.

So, you know, women have a different perspective and these women in that collective, they had it down. After the El Paso conference, we had a meeting. The state met again. I forget it if was a conference or probably a caucus, to sum up what had happened in El Paso, and I remember what their summation was. [laughs] "Look, what we had at El Paso was a struggle between Corky Gonzales and José Ángel Gutiérrez to see who was going to be king of Aztlán." [laughs] Just cut off everybody’s balls. That’s all it was. And that’s the way they summed it up. You have to look at it, there were a lot of issues. The California delegation was much better than the conference in El Paso, okay? And these women were a part of that process, so the thing in El Paso, they said, hey, that’s what it was, a fight between Corky and José Ángel Gutiérrez to see who was going to be king of Aztlán. [laughs] You know, all the fighting, all the struggle, all the strategy, everything. They said no. [unclear] for you. You want them on a plate? [laughs]





ESPINO:

Did they ever—I mean, I’d like to find out more about this collective. I wonder if they ever went on to actually get involved in local politics in San Jose, if they ever won seats within the Democratic Party, I’m wondering.





BECERRA:

I don’t know. I don’t know what happened after.





ESPINO:

I’m going to pause it right now. [End of July 26, 2013 interview]