Writing the Movement: The La Raza Newspaper Collective and Social Protest

• In Event: Couriers of Justice: Print and Radio Activists and Social Change

Abstract

This paper presentation explores the role of oral history in rescuing the little known history of how Chicanos and Chicanas used the print media to organize a community and advance their political objectives. The La Raza Newspaper was founded in 1967 in the basement of the Church of the Epiphany, an Episcopal Church in Lincoln Heights, a small Los Angeles barrio. Several Anglo priests from the Church of the Epiphany made up the generation of politicized social justice activists working in underserved communities during the 1960s and 1970s. With their support and encouragement Chicana and Chicano activists founded a newspaper to communicate through poetry, news analysis, cartoons and photography the experience of Mexican American in the 1960s, a group quite often left out of the mainstream media.

This presentation is the outgrowth of an oral history series that seeks to document the Los Angeles Chicana and Chicano Movement. Interviews conducted in this series cover a wide range of issues and include the founders and members of the La Raza newspaper collective. Highlighting the collective’s work will provide an entry point into understanding several themes that have emerged from the oral histories such gender politics in a movement organization, interracial dating, and the role of inter-ethnic organizing in Los Angeles. All of which will be discussed in this multi-media presentation that utilizes audio, video and photographs.

Author

• Virginia Rose Espino, UCLA Center for Oral History Research