Starving for Justice: Hunger Strikes, the Chicana/o Movement, and the Struggle for Dignity

• In Event: 3161 - Critical Studies and Social Movement Frameworks

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the black freedom movement indicates that it was “long,” rather than short. Temporally speaking, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often bookend this movement, making it seem as black activism did not occur before or after these critical events. Moreover, most accounts, following this perspective, focus on straight black male activists, ignoring, not so coincidentally, the black freedom movement’s intersectional, inter-generational, geographically dispersed, and radical roots. Similarly, contemporary literature on the Chicana/o Movement has de-centered great male leaders, demonstrating that it included Chicanas, queer people, people of color, and progressive white activists. It was also imbued with radical “freedom dreams” and created ties with Latin American and Mexican revolutionary movements. These interventions are crucial, as they expand our previous understanding of these extremely diverse social movements. In this piece, I contend that while scholars have done exemplary work on tracing these two movements “backward,” they have not yet moved “forward.” That is, with some rare exceptions, very few studies have demonstrated that the Chicana/o Movement persisted into the 1990s and beyond. Indeed, during that decade, Chicana/o, Latina/o students on college campuses went on hunger strikes, demanding greater dignity and respect. Taken from a longer book project, this paper frames hunger strikes as a form of “spectacular speech.” It also analyzes these protests from a “long” social movement perspective, emphasizing their intersectional, intergenerational, and internationalist orientation.

Author

• Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, University of California, Santa Barbara