Reies Tijerina, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes Libres, and the Limits of Radical Rhetoric

• In Event: Mexican and Mexican American Activism: Exploring Bridges between Rhetoric, Social Movements, and Communication Theory

Abstract

In 1985 rhetorical critics John Hammerback and Richard Jensen noted that “although biographers and scholars chronicled his life and explained his movement . . . Tijerina received no in-depth rhetorical study, nor has the public address which created and built his organization” (A War of Words: Chicano Protest in the 1960s and 1970s, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985, p. 14). Apart from Hammerback and Jensen’s work and the work of a few others, their statement is just as true more than twenty years later. What is more conspicuously absent, however, is scholarly attention paid to the organization and movement Tijerina helped to found—the Alianza Federal de Mercedes Libres [Federal Alliance of Free Land Grants]. In this project I attend to Tijerina’s public rhetoric and, more broadly, the activism of the Alianza. In particular, this paper discusses the two most well-known radical acts of the Alianza: their occupation of Echo Amphitheater Park in 1966 and their armed raid on the Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico in 1967. Using press accounts, biographical narratives, and eye-witness reports, I construct a rhetorical analysis of these two protest events as “border rhetoric.” The Alianza’s confrontational tactics navigated borders between inclusion and exclusion, between citizenship and foreignness, and between radical rhetoric and revolution. Through a rhetorical analysis of its radical activities as “texts,” I argue that Tijerina and the Alianza’s activism helps us to extend social movement theory, complicate understandings of Chicana/o movements, and reconceptualize the limits of radical rhetoric in America.

Author

• Josue Cisneros, Northeastern University