Episode 114
What Were the Latino Urban Riots?
This week, I am issuing an apology on behalf of myself and the podcast. In the previous 90 episodes of this show, we have discussed slavery, the African American experience, immigration, Asian American and Native American history numerous times. And yet, we have not directly addressed the problematic experiences of Mexican, Latino and Hispanic people in the US… until now.
So this week, we are visiting 1960s Chicago, a city that poured fuel on the already explosive issue of Civil Rights, during a period of extraordinary national transformation, as I ask… what were the Latino Urban Riots?
...
Special guest for this episode:
- Lilia Fernández, a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies History at the University of Illinois, Chicago, specialising in the history of Latinos in the mid-to-late 20th century United States. Her books include Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago
- Lorrin Thomas, an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University. Her research explores ideas about rights and equality in the twentieth century Americas, with a focus on Latin American history, and her books include Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City.
...
Highlights from this episode:
- The long and complex history of Latino migration to U.S. cities, especially Chicago and New York
- How urban renewal and housing discrimination intensified racial segregation
- The role of police brutality and surveillance in triggering community uprisings
- The 1966 Puerto Rican riot in Chicago and the 1967 riot in New York — what really happened
- The impact of the Civil Rights Act and rising expectations for racial equality
- How media narratives distorted the nature of Latino protest and resistance
...
Additional Resources:
Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights – The Rutgers Latino Studies Research Initiative by Lorrin R Thomas and Aldo A Lauria Santiago
Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago by Lilia Fernandez
Amazon.com: Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City by Lorrin Thomas
Humboldt Park Riots: Chicago Puerto Ricans Stand Up Against Violence by David Josiah
The 1966 Division Street Uprising & the Puerto Rican community in Chicago from Unsung History
Forgotten Latino Urban Riots and Why They Can Happen Again - Latino USA
...
And if you like this episode, you might also love:
What Do We Get Wrong About the Civil Rights Movement?
What Challenge Does Black Lives Matter Present to America?
...
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Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
just caveat and say that anything that could potentially go wrong today seems to have.
2
:if my sleeping toddler wakes up while my wife is also at the house, that's a high
possibility right now.
3
:So if you hear a three-year-old scream, that is what it is.
4
:This week, I am issuing an apology on behalf of myself and the podcast.
5
:In the previous 90 episodes of this show, we have discussed slavery, the African American
experience, immigration, Asian American and Native American history numerous times.
6
:We have discussed slavery, the African-American experience, immigration, Asian-American
and Native American history numerous times.
7
:And yet we have not directly addressed the problematic experiences of Mexican, Latino and
Hispanic people in the US.
8
:Until now.
9
:So this week, we're heading over to 1960s Chicago, a city that poured fuel on the already
explosive issue of civil rights during a period of extraordinary national transformation.
10
:As I ask.
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:What were the Latino urban riots?
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:To discuss this, I am joined by...
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:I'm going to re-record that intro afterwards, one of those days.
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:m Yeah.
15
:by the way, I wanted to say um in terms of my title, you could, um it's, you could just
say professor of history.
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:You don't have to say director of graduate studies.
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:Just correct that.
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:Wonderful.
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:Thank you.
20
:um
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:Who discussed this?
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:I am joined by a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, specializing
in the history of Latinos in the mid to late 20th century U.S.
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:Her books include Brown in the Windy City, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago,
which there is a link to in the show notes if you're interested in reading, which I highly
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:recommend.
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:Welcome to the podcast, Lillia Fernandez.
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:Thank you.
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:Really great to have you, Lillia.
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:And I'm also joined today by an associate professor in the Department of History at
Rutgers University.
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:Her research explores ideas about rights and equality in the 20th century Americas with a
focus on Latin American history.
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:And her books include Puerto Rican citizen.
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:Her books include Puerto Rico citizen, history and political identity in 20th century New
York City.
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:Again, all of that is in the show notes.
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:A big hello to Lauren Thomas.
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:Thank you.
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:Liam, eh actually, think especially for the purposes of this podcast, it would be great to
list the book, the second book, um which maybe uh I didn't, it's on my bio.
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:um It's called Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights.
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:Do you want me to, do you see it?
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:I have that now, just going to copy and paste that into my introduction and redo that for
you.
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:And it's co-authored with another historian at Rutgers Aldo Loria Santiago, who actually
has done more specific research on urban riots in the mid Atlantic US than I have.
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:um So it's a really relevant resource for this material.
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:Yeah, that's not a problem.
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:I will ah just amend that.
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:Okay, I'll just quickly do that intro again for you.
44
:uh And I am also joined by an associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers
University.
45
:Her research explores ideas about rights and equality in the 20th century Americas with a
focus on Latin American history.
46
:And her books include Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights, the Rutgers Latino
Studies Research Initiative, which she co-authored with Aldo A.
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:Loria Santiago.
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:Again, that is in the show notes along with all of her other amazing work.
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:A big hello to Lauren Thomas.
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:Really great to have you on the podcast and thank you both for joining me for this.
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:I guess first off, because a lot of our listeners, particularly international ones, maybe
don't have a lot of understanding about this aspect of, I guess we can call part of the
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:civil rights era.
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:So Lillia, I wonder if you could provide some context and paint a picture for us of what
post-war Chicago looks like.
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:Sure.
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:Well first I would back up for a moment and just um say that um Latinos, people of Latin
American descent or origin, have a much longer history in the United States than I think
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:most people realize.
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:um And just um to promote a resource if folks are interested, I highly recommend the PBS
documentary called Latino Americans that came out several years ago and which I um use
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:frequently in my teaching that covers the history of uh Spanish-speaking people or those
who were colonized by the Spanish in the Americas going back to the 16th century and their
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:presence.
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:in places like Florida, the US Southwest, even as far north as the Midwest.
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:So in a place like Chicago, which really you might recall is a central hub or has been a
central hub for the nation, a kind of transit point between East and West, North and
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:South.
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:Mexican immigrants have been coming to the region since the late 1800s, early 1900s.
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:But was really after, uh during and after World War I, when the numbers started to grow
and during as well during the Mexican Revolution.
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:When people were fleeing the political turbulence and violence in Mexico, that the numbers
of Mexican immigrants in Chicago began increasing.
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:Now those numbers declined somewhat during the Great Depression when public officials
decided to deport or repatriate uh many immigrants.
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:And so in the 1940s during World War II and in the years after was when we first started
to see the numbers increase significantly.
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:uh Mexicans, Mexican-Americans also who were already in the US and lived in Texas for
example, along with Puerto Ricans started migrating to places like Chicago because they
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:were booming in terms of industrial production during m and even after the war for some
time.
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:So they were coming either being directly recruited by employers, they were coming on
government contracts as temporary workers,
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:uh being encouraged to migrate by the Puerto Rico Migration Division or coming on their
own through word of mouth to reconnect with family members or because you know someone was
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:already there in Chicago.
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:So the population was growing in this period after World War II.
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:uh
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:Most folks were settling in industrial areas.
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:So that would be the near west side of Chicago, uh south Chicago, where a lot of the steel
mills were located.
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:uh Or in the back of the yards or packing town area where the slaughterhouses and the
stockyards were located.
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:And again, many of them would have been coming to those kinds of jobs in this period.
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:So how does that in Chicago compare demographically to the rest of the US at that time?
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:Lauren, do you want to take that?
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:Well, guess the, I mean, Mexico migration from Mexico and from other parts of the United
States, Mexican Americans who were coming to Chicago from elsewhere in the U.S.
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:by the early 50s, the population was close to 100,000.
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:Is that right, Lilia in Chicago or like 75,000, something like that.
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:It was substantial.
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:And um I mean, there were other, you know, most parts of the mid-Atlantic, the urban areas
of the mid-Atlantic were attracting um more and more Puerto Rican migrant laborers in the
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:same era.
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:um
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:Puerto Rican, the earliest Puerto Rican communities in the Eastern United States, I'm not
talking about Florida, which had actually attracted Puerto Rican independence fighters in
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:the 19th century um when they were fighting off Spain um in the 1860s through the 1890s.
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:But starting in the 1910s and accelerating the 1920s, um New York, and then some
surrounding um smaller cities,
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:attracted Puerto Rican workers um who wanted to find more opportunity.
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:so these sort of processes of migration of people seeking work was something that was
familiar in any urban area in the US.
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:there were, uh I think there's also some
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:productive comparison to the history of African Americans in the early 20th century.
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:I think many of your listeners may have heard of the great migration of African Americans
from the US South.
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:uh And people migrated to cities all over the United States.
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:mean, in waves.
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:Initially, in the 20s and 30s, was cities kind of closer to whatever southern states
people were coming from.
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:but increasingly by World War II, people were going out West and successive waves of
workers came to Chicago, to Gary, Indiana, to Detroit, to New York City.
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:And so there were these kind of heterogeneous populations of labor migrants in cities.
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:um And many of them, I mean, certainly the people who were
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:classified as or identified as African American or Latino, experienced various forms of
racial discrimination.
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:um And especially this was difficult in housing and employment.
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:And so, you know, the kind of conditions in the 1950s that preceded the era of urban riots
were shared conditions of struggle um in just kind of
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:finding economic stability, uh dignity in their lives and their communities.
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:um And so that's the kind of more general starting point for what we think of as the
upheaval of the mid and late:
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:Yeah, I think it's so easy when we think about early 20th century US in this sort of
heavily kind of segregated and prejudiced era to sort of think of it as just, you know,
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:white and black without wanting to be too crude about that simplification.
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:it will be really interesting to know kind of how that prejudice and discrimination was
projected towards Latino communities as well.
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:Yeah, and um to go back to your um question, because I realize now I think you were asking
about how the demographics compared uh nationally to other parts of the country.
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:What I would say to that is that uh Chicago did not have the largest Mexican population um
in this period, in the:
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:New York had the largest uh Puerto Rican uh numbers.
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:And the Southwest, particularly cities like uh Los Angeles, San Antonio, Texas, um and
elsewhere had large uh Mexican populations.
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:But um to address, I guess, the conditions that people were encountering, know, when
arriving to US cities in the:
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:much more um coexistence, multiracial and multicultural communities, I would say.
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:um
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:As the numbers started to increase, then that's when we began to see much more rigid
segregation or much more um explicit forms of prejudice and discrimination.
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:Like the kind of housing, sorry to interrupt you, Lillia, but the kind of housing
discrimination that pushed people into increasingly, know, neighborhoods where
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:increasingly nearly everybody was black or brown and increasingly poor instead of mixed
re far more common before the:
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:Yes, and I think that the nation's m ethos, the kind of the culture was very different as
well.
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:Whereas before World War II, uh Americans recognized or at least tolerated much more
ethnic and national diversity among the European immigrants who were in the country.
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:After World War II, particularly as the nations uh called to unite in the war effort,
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:uh and people are essentially asked to shed their ethnicity or their nationality, the
lines between those who are white and those who are non-white become much sharper.
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:And so in that moment, uh Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans, of
course, uh become much more visible and seen much more as different and as other.
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:Yeah, the term minority populations had been popular in the US in, I just actually
published or am close to publishing an article about this in the Journal of Social
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:History.
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:The term was popular in the 1930s and 40s, but after World War II and when it was popular,
it minority meant anyone who was not kind of born in the United or sorry, their ancestors
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:were not born in the United States.
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:by the early 19th century.
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:m But um after World War II, uh white ethnics just kind of drifted out of this minority
category.
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:And it was very clear in a lot of the public discourse that what minority meant by the
early:
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:em And um so in a place like Chicago, which is
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:I mean, it's true, as Lilia pointed out, Chicago did not have the largest Mexican-American
population or the largest Puerto Rican population, but it was distinctive, uh if not
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:exactly unique, but it had the largest combined population of Puerto Rican and Mexican um
econd generation by the early:
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:And so this was the place where m
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:Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans brought together their histories of labor migration
and their experiences of prejudice and discrimination often in other places.
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:mean, some of the, many of the people involved in the riots in the mid sixties in Chicago,
some had been born in Chicago, but many had not.
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:um And it was, it was this uh exceptionally kind of
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:uh heterogeneous Latino population, which certainly was not true of any other city or
place in the United States at that point in, you know, in the fifties and sixties.
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:So how segregated was life between Latino communities and white communities in Chicago and
in other cities?
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:Well, in Chicago, would say, initially, when people were arriving, they obviously had to
come to existing neighborhoods.
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:So they oftentimes did live among Italian Americans, Polish Americans, and others.
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:uh Not always peacefully.
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:At times, there was discrimination and prejudicial sentiment towards them.
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:uh But as urban renewal policies uh unfolded,
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:in places like Chicago and people were forced to move out of those older neighborhoods and
into new areas where they had not lived in significant numbers.
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:There the tensions and the conflicts increased significantly.
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:So as Mexican Americans, for example, started moving southward to the Pilsen neighborhood,
which by its name should suggest that it was, you know, had Czech, Bohemian origins, ah
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:they encountered a lot of
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:you know, conflict and tension there with existing residents.
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:As Puerto Ricans were moving northward into Westtown and Humboldt Park, again, with a lot
of Eastern European immigrants, there also they were experiencing some discrimination and
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:rejection from local residents.
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:And this, of course, extended to uh relations with police and law enforcement, which we
can talk about because that leads directly to
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:the tensions and conflicts that erupt in violence.
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:And I will say, do you want me to address the question in the New York context, Liam?
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:Yeah, by all means just follow on and go for it.
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:yeah, so I mean, I think that a similar pattern was true in New York, the pattern Lillia
described in Chicago, which is that early migrants, they had, as we said before, had lived
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:in fairly heterogeneous, or actually extremely heterogeneous neighborhoods that were
increasingly becoming sort of sorted by ethnicity and race, and then uh urban renewal
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:accelerated that.
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:in extreme ways and then concentrated people who were experiencing the most housing
discrimination or the most kind of employment discrimination and impoverishment into
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:certain neighborhoods.
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:So the kind of overall uh segregation of people of color compared to whites in New York
was...
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:uh
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:increasing dramatically by the mid-1960s.
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:Regarding the conflicts with police, which was, um as we'll get to when we talk about the
story of this specific riot in Chicago, was the precipitating cause.
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:um But those conflicts were also longstanding sources of resentment and um
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:a focus of organizing effort by, certainly by Puerto Ricans.
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:I'm not sure about the history of Mexican Americans in Chicago and how much people had
their resentments before the:
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:I'm sure Lillia can talk about that.
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:But for Puerto Ricans in New York, um I mean, this was kind of a complaint from the very
beginning.
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:um
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:uh records of migrants who came as um in the 1920s who described the police um as brutal
and racist.
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:One oral history I read of a migrant who'd arrived in the 1930s said, for us the police
were like the Gestapo.
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:I mean, that might sound like hyperbole, but um you know, bringing kind of uh
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:unpredictable violence and kind of like efforts to control the population into these
migrant immigrant neighborhoods was something that Puerto Ricans experienced, had
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:experienced for decades before the 1960s, before the era of riots that were, I I would
venture to guess that if you studied all of the incidents
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:um And our colleague Aldo describes the riots of this era pretty expansively as just kind
of, let me, I can't actually, you're gonna have to edit this out.
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:can't find his, um okay, our colleague Aldo Loria Santiago describes these um episodes of
rioting and unrest.
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:pretty expensively as rioting.
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:and large-scale confrontations.
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:Sorry, I'll say that again.
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:He describes these episodes of unrest expansively as riots, revolts, and large-scale
confrontations, most often confrontations with police, sometimes inter-ethnic
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:confrontation.
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:But if you examined all of these and...
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:uh I mean, there were dozens in the mid Atlantic between the mid 1960s and the early
:
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:If you examine them, I would venture to guess that more than 90 % were precipitated by a
specific incident involving the police.
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:But of course, that specific incident was preceded by years and sometimes decades of
frustration and
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:kind of experience with over policing, hyper surveillance.
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:um And in New York in particular, I'm actually not sure when what this special police
force called the Tactical Patrol Force was started.
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:um But that was something that community members, mean, both community leaders and
participants in riots and confrontations with police
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:cited over and over and over as a kind of a source of uh conflict.
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:I mean, they brought in conflict, they brought in trouble and violence, and they also
represented this kind of uh extreme control or effort to control these communities.
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:And I, sorry, go on, Lillia.
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:I was going to say, I can give a little bit of background, I guess that would precede this
perhaps, you know, in the editing, if you want to talk about the presence of police in
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:urban areas and the, you know, how these tensions developed.
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:Yeah, in fact, I was actually, just gonna ask more specifically about that because, you
know, I think, I'm not sure everything you were saying, Lauren, is quite as hyperbolic as
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:maybe you think when you consider that, you know, police brutality is something that uh
Americans in particular are still dealing with today.
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:But, uh yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's some people out there.
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:that might not be hyperbole either.
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:mean, similar tactics and not too dissimilar goals.
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:Yeah.
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:but I guess, Lili, it would be, it would be good to get a little bit more, color around
this in terms of, what, what was that relationship?
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:And, and, and also, I guess what I'm really building up to here, kind of what were these,
what were these kind of key events that, that kind of lit the flame that eventually
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:triggered the riot?
205
:Yeah, so, you know, we might recall that, you know, police generally were meant to um keep
the peace, so to speak, in urban areas.
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:In many cities, they were there to control uh workers, to control the population.
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:You know, this was a form of social control to make the streets, um you know, pleasant and
accessible for more middle upper class um residents.
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:And so the police had a long history of
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:you know, harassing, know, roughing up uh people in poor working class areas.
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:uh They often broke up um labor strikes and those kinds of uprisings, right, in the late
:
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:um And they didn't have particularly good relations with whoever the most recent immigrant
group was at the times.
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:So whether it was Italians, uh
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:or other Southern Eastern European immigrants.
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:And recall that the police generally tended to be um Northern and Western Europeans.
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:So they were Irish and German primarily, or had British um origins.
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:But...
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:um
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:As Mexicans began arriving in cities like Chicago, the police did not treat them very
well.
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:could be rude and rough with them, express their prejudice towards them.
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:And particularly as Puerto Ricans began to arrive, and again, negative stereotypes about
the population circulated, uh the police could be pretty harsh with young people in
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:particular, with young men especially.
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:The other thing to remember is that in many of these urban neighborhoods, there was a long
tradition of gangs, neighborhood or ethnic gangs that formed either along ethnic lines or
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:nationality um or along geographical boundaries.
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:So when Mexicans and Puerto Ricans arrived to a place like Chicago, they often also formed
into gangs to protect themselves, to defend themselves from, you know, uh
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:other young men in the streets.
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:And so the police, you know, uh could be violent towards them and trying to uh repress
them and such.
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:But the key moment that set off the first uprising in Chicago in June of 1966 was after
the mayor, Richard uh J.
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:Daley, uh had designated the first week in June as Puerto Rico week.
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:So was supposed to be a week to celebrate
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:Puerto Rican heritage, uh know, supposed to be a week planned with festivities and parades
and you know, lots of public outdoor activities.
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:Now, I'm sorry?
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:Sounds like a great thing.
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:Yes, well, now, um not everyone, uh not all Chicagoans, we might imagine, were supportive
of this or thought this was a good idea, right?
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:Not all were in favor of seeing Puerto Ricans celebrating out in the streets and such.
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:And certainly, um the police, who already had hostile relations with many of the young men
in the community, um were not too pleased.
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:As people gathered out in the street, this was on the last night of the week long
celebrations, um police started to come around and harassing young men and began chasing
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:two young men down an alley.
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:They opened fire on and shot a young man named Arcelis Cruz.
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:When residents out on the street saw what had happened and the police of course claimed
self-defense, they said that Cruz was pulling out a gun.
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:which others contested and said, no, it was a comb.
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:And this, by the way, was often the defense that police officers used.
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:They would say, the suspect was pulling out a weapon.
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:um Whether or not that was true is up for question.
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:um In any case, when uh witnesses saw what the police had done and that Cruz had been
shot, was bleeding there on the street, they started to gather and protest the police.
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:So uh this first uprising in June of 1966 in Chicago was uh an expression of the
frustration of local residents with the harassment, the brutality, the abuse that many had
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:experienced firsthand or witnessed uh by police against their community.
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:Now, very importantly, and I'm not sure to what extent this was the case in other cities,
but I'm sure it was there as well.
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:there was a priest in the community, Father Don Headley, who was there, observed and
witnessed, this was three days of, uh you know, what people would call rioting or, you
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:know, uh public protest, the community in a standoff against uh law enforcement.
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:He noted that some of the biggest troublemakers in the community, the guys who were trying
to incite violence and encouraging the crowds to
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:you know, knock over, turn over police cars and such, that they were police officers
themselves.
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:They were law enforcement who essentially were undercover and were trying to um
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:uh promote this violence and basically stir up the trouble.
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:So I think we have to look with some critical eyes, look at these cases with complexity to
understand what exactly was happening, what these dynamics were.
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:Yes, certainly there were people in the community who were uh
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:vocally protesting against law enforcement who were angry and upset with the abuse and the
harassment that they experienced.
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:uh Yes, there were young people who probably were engaged in, um you know, illegal
activities, who were being violent and such.
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:But I think there's a lot of evidence also that many of these urban um disturbances in
this period were being fueled by infiltrators and provocateurs.
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:who were trying to make um these situations worse.
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:This is the problem, right?
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:When you have such gross, like systemic inequality is that it empowers people who want to
be violent uh for prejudicial reasons to do so and do so without repercussions as well.
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:Because I imagine in that time it was a lose-lose for Puerto Ricans and for any minority
community, because if they don't defend themselves, they get hurt or killed.
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:And if they do, then they're corroborating exactly why they should be hated in the first
place, right?
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:Right, and there was just such a ready vocabulary for treating these incidents as unruly
people who were not law abiding, who were not interested in the rules of middle class
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:society.
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:um So talking about, and we see a lot of the same um kind of discursive.
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:tools used in talking today about um episodes of unrest or protest.
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:um And we'll get too deep into that now, know, oftentimes, you know, just kind of calling
it or the ways these uh incidents of protest, I mean, because most often they were
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:This was a way, this was a kind of unplanned version of protest, often following months or
years of other kinds of protest and negotiation and efforts to uh advocate for these
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:communities that felt uh over policed and targeted by police violence.
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:uh
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:And, you know, simply dismissing them as looters or uh unruly youth, violent youth was
such a familiar narrative to a lot of white and middle-class Americans uh that it just, uh
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:it was the sort of the description of first resort when an episode like this happened.
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:And I'd like to describe the
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:first major large-scale Puerto Rican riot that happened in New York City in 1967, almost
exactly a year after the riot in Chicago.
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:And interestingly, it came not long after the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which was something
that was an event and a celebration that had been created by members of the community.
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:over well over a decade before.
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:uh But even more interesting, I think, is that this riot came about six weeks after a
major conference that had been convened by a group, a large group and heterogeneous group
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:of Puerto Rican leaders, community leaders, labor leaders.
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:uh
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:who met with members of the mayor's cabinet and other city officials to talk about just
the whole range of problems that were confronting the Puerto Rican community.
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:um was, you know, deindustrialization was accelerating after the mid-60s.
283
:um And I, one other aspect of the kind of background frustrations that I wanted to
highlight here
284
:in both the Chicago riot, Latino riot and in the Puerto Rican riot in New York, is that
the Civil Rights Act of:
285
:perceived to be transformative potential for black and brown communities.
286
:supported by the federal government, supported now by congressional law uh that prohibited
discrimination, prohibited discrimination in educational settings, in m employment.
287
:uh Later, the 1968 Housing Act would extend that into housing.
288
:um And after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, uh President Johnson issued an executive order
that specified um
289
:the requirement that employers uh take what he phrased, and this phrase had been used
before, but not as familiarly as now, had um President Johnson's executive order specified
290
:that employers take affirmative action to ensure um not just an absence of prejudice, to
promote equality in their workplaces.
291
:And so there was this kind of
292
:simultaneous dynamic of increased optimism and expectations because the federal government
was taking actions it had never before taken, you know, to extend the kind of slow rollout
293
:of the fight against, well, I'm sorry, to extend the slow acknowledgement of uh racial
equality that
294
:began formally in the courts with Brown v.
295
:Board of Ed in 1954.
296
:So 10 years later, this sweeping legislation
297
:laid the groundwork for a far more extensive uh
298
:fulfillment of the goals of equality.
299
:And yet at the same time, the socioeconomic conditions of a lot of black and brown
communities in the mid:
300
:And I won't try to kind of capture or describe the whole range of um the shift in the
301
:African American civil rights movement because that has its own kind of complex and very
important history.
302
:But in Latino communities, there were similar kinds of um hopes and expectations that
were.
303
:becoming more difficult to sustain and people were becoming increasingly frustrated and
angry.
304
:And, okay, back again to the behavior of police, there's this kind of rhetoric and kind of
ons about equality in the mid-:
305
:lot of...
306
:Puerto Rican and Mexican-American communities or mixed Latino and uh Black communities.
307
:And so that's kind of the broad context for these moments of explosion.
308
:And so what happened in New York in 1967, a little less than a year after the riot in
Chicago, was a very similar incident.
309
:A young Puerto Rican man was shot to death by an off-duty police officer.
310
:And he said that the young man had been wielding a knife.
311
:Street protests turned into full-blown riot.
312
:I mean, first there was protest and then it became riots and they also extended across
about three days.
313
:In the New York case, I mean, as I explained, there had been this effort less than two
months earlier uh for collaboration among Puerto Rican community labor leaders m and
314
:the...
315
:mayor's office, Mayor John Lindsay, was known as uh a, uh not just a liberal Democrat, but
as a kind of social progressive.
316
:And so he tried to address the police and kind of rein them in.
317
:He ordered the police not to shoot at rioters, which I think he understood was a
possibility and without any firm leadership.
318
:probably would have happened in many instances as it was.
319
:There were two people killed during the riot by police, but of course the police denied
responsibility for those shootings.
320
:It was later proven by ballistics evidence.
321
:And so by 1960s standards, this
322
:riot was relatively contained, but still there were multiple lives lost.
323
:mean, tons of, um you know, people's communities were destroyed and, you know, outside
observers might say, well, they did it themselves.
324
:um But this was a kind of, uh you know, communities reaching a breaking point.
325
:Yeah.
326
:And I guess just to sort of clarify what we've been talking about, the purpose of these
rights, or I guess the reason why they happened, it self-defense?
327
:Was it protest?
328
:Was it activism?
329
:Or was it just this sort of built-up frustration that manifested in violence?
330
:would say, oh, can I go ahead Lauren?
331
:Yeah, I would say some of it was spontaneous protest.
332
:It really was frustration with some pretty unbearable conditions.
333
:Now one other thing to provide some context here, because I certainly don't want to
oversimplify this and say that all the police um were bad and all of the residents were
334
:good and innocent, right?
335
:The reality is, however,
336
:If you look at the press in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, there were dozens of stories
about police corruption.
337
:Police would shake down organized criminals.
338
:Police were robbing butcher stores, butchers and stealing thousands of dollars of meat.
339
:Police were engaged in all sorts of corruption at this time.
340
:So,
341
:It's no surprise then that they were carrying that bad behavior into these working class
Latino neighborhoods as well.
342
:there's plenty of evidence of police shootings of Puerto Rican and Mexican American men,
of killing of them in fact.
343
:The Latino community was not killing law enforcement officers in high numbers.
344
:It's the other way around.
345
:Or torturing them.
346
:You might recall also, Liam, your audience might um recognize that Chicago was also the
site of the notorious John Birch, a police captain, I believe he was, who only in the
347
:2000s was revealed that he had carried out this decades-long systematic torture, primarily
of black men in the city of Chicago.
348
:And there have been lawsuits with millions of dollars in damages awarded by the courts um
because of this.
349
:So, you know, the reality is that a lot of the police system, a lot of law enforcement was
in fact very corrupt.
350
:uh And that's to say nothing of immigration enforcement when we speak specifically about
Mexican immigrants.
351
:In the 1970s especially, you know, at the time what was known as INS, Immigration and
Naturalization Services, INS officers, border patrol officers, would come into Mexican
352
:areas looking for, trying to round up
353
:That I like what the president is calling for today, know, in harassing um immigrants who
they suspected weren't documented.
354
:um But, you know, to go back to your question about, um you know, what uh set off these
events, these incidents, oftentimes there were public celebrations, as Lauren described in
355
:New York, as uh happened in other cities around the country.
356
:um
357
:The Chicano moratorium, example, 1970, August 29th, 1970 in Los Angeles, was a peaceful
protest against the Vietnam War.
358
:Thousands of Mexican Americans had come out to express their support for the Vietnamese
people, to protest the fact that so many Mexican American young men were coming home in
359
:body bags, were dying in what they saw as the senseless war against the North Vietnamese.
360
:In that moment when thousands of people were gathered peacefully in a park, arrived,
police and county sheriffs, LAPD and county sheriffs, and opened fire.
361
:And in fact, they killed a very famous Mexican American journalist, Ruben Salazar.
362
:So unfortunately, these moments of public gatherings, of celebrations outdoors, moments
when the police started to
363
:you know, um open fire on festival goers or protesters, marchers, uh they often are what
exploded into what were often described as riots in the press and in the media, but I
364
:think um would more accurately be described as uprisings or protests in many cases.
365
:Yeah, from everything that you've sort of described there, strikes me that it just framing
it around this relationship, you know, between with law enforcement as well really
366
:highlights the the kind of unwinnable situation that, you know, I guess every minority
community was in in that they couldn't just peacefully ask for the law to be changed.
367
:couldn't just
368
:You know, they weren't being heard or listened to to begin with.
369
:And even when the law is changed, know, things like the Civil Rights Act, which was
unquestionably necessary and, you know, a positive step forward.
370
:doesn't make people less racist overnight.
371
:And so you've still got this fundamental issue of, you know, one word against another of,
you know, people turning a blind eye to what the white man does and, you know, laying down
372
:the law a lot harsher on what a minority group does.
373
:So it's, know,
374
:The riot in that sense just felt like this almost inevitable consequence of decades of
discrimination that you've been describing.
375
:would agree with that description.
376
:I I think that applies to both the Chicago riot in 66 and the New York riot in 67, as well
as all of these smaller incidents of, you know, celebration that turned into conflict with
377
:police or protest that turned into rioting with the kind of...
378
:interference of police and injection of police violence.
379
:One thing I want to emphasize here that we've, think Lily and I have both indicated, but
uh Latino leaders were in the:
380
:with how little their own decades of advocacy and claims about uh
381
:their civil rights in the face of a history of discrimination, a history of racial
violence, how little that was acknowledged by white officials or in public discourse in
382
:general.
383
:And just a couple of points to highlight, a couple of points of historical irony to
highlight this.
384
:The day after the Puerto Rican riot,
385
:ended I think, think this was like the you one day after so right around the same time as
the riot in in July:
386
:Commission on Civil Disorders which is commonly referred to as the Kerner Commission to
study civil unrest you know that had been like four years of three years of
387
:violence in US cities, mostly in black neighborhoods by that point, but now by this point,
there were two major riots in Latino neighborhoods also.
388
:So Johnson convened that commission one day after this riot in Puerto Rican East Harlem
ended.
389
:And when the Kerner Commission published its 300 page report in 1968,
390
:Latinos were mentioned three times in 300 pages and like in passing no acknowledgement
that the conditions and this is I mean So I mean the kind of the idea of the ghetto
391
:conditions I mean that was the term that was used so often m in the 60s in particular uh
Was mostly understood to be like in
392
:cities like, you know, New York, Chicago, LA.
393
:But the fact is, Mexican Americans who were in many localities in the West, they were the
plurality, if not sometimes the majority of the population, those conditions uh were as
394
:present and as defining of people's lives as were the quote unquote ghetto conditions for
Black Americans that were
395
:studied by members of the current Kerner Commission.
396
:so this kind of sense of enormous frustration with invisibility and just having like
decades of organizing efforts be silenced was something that just was so, it was so
397
:ironically and painfully obvious to
398
:many Latinos at this point in time.
399
:um In fact, a few weeks after the
400
:the riot in Puerto Rican New York, there was a feature in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine
titled A Minority Nobody Knows.
401
:And it was about Mexican Americans who are referred to as the long neglected minority that
was quote, beginning to stir.
402
:But it only talked about farm workers.
403
:This was sort of like addressing the early farm workers movement.
404
:that would become much more visible by 1968, 69, 70.
405
:um And the point here is that so the minority nobody knows is still, I mean, you know,
even journalists who thought they were kind of shining a light on this story understood
406
:not, it just did not understand the scope of the issue and had no concept of the depth of
407
:effort and um organizing that had been happening in both Mexican American and Puerto Rican
communities since the early 20th century.
408
:you know, since the 1920s was the first civil rights organizations organized by Mexican
Americans in the West, um etc.
409
:So I just wanted to highlight that um confounding invisibility
410
:Yeah.
411
:was happening simultaneously with the kind of, you know, in cities like Chicago and New
York, the targeting of Latinos by police.
412
:Yeah, and I guess, you know, to that point and to try and bring this to some sort of uh
close, do you think, how did life really change after the riots, if at all, for Puerto
413
:Rican communities?
414
:would say for some, yeah, I would say for some, mean, local governments had to respond in
some way, you know, positively.
415
:So in some cases, you know, um municipalities opened up more um employment for Puerto
Ricans who, you know, by the way, are U.S.
416
:citizens, and so they, you know, would qualify for, you know, social service positions,
for growing numbers of slots in
417
:local police departments and other kinds of public facing agencies.
418
:um So there was a possibility for uh the middle class to expand somewhat in that period.
419
:um As people were able to move out of these uh poor districts, also they were able to
improve their living conditions.
420
:uh
421
:Yeah, and that's one point I wanted to go back to actually, Liam, if that's okay.
422
:You had asked in the show notes about was the city in decline or was it on the up at this
time?
423
:One thing I think that's important for us to note is that most American cities by the
middle of the 20th century were pretty aged.
424
:You know, they were at least 100 years old or so.
425
:infrastructure was declining.
426
:Remember, the suburbs were booming.
427
:So anybody who could, who were generally white middle class folks,
428
:who if they could afford to buy, move out and buy brand new housing in the suburbs, many
did.
429
:And so those who were left in the inner cities were the people who had the fewest
resources and means.
430
:um And it became very easy at this time when um other white residents are seeing the
cities in decline and their decayed and the services are um not good.
431
:and recall also that manufacturing is beginning to decline also the jobs are leaving a lot
of the urban northeast the midwest then it's very easy to point the finger at and to blame
432
:the newest arrivals the most recent newcomers southern african-americans who migrated
north uh puerto rican's and mexicans but as a result of the protests i would say um
433
:and the demands for greater equality, civil rights and such, there were some gains that
both Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans enjoyed.
434
:But that doesn't mean, as Lauren suggested earlier, that people's minds changed overnight
and that racism was eliminated necessarily.
435
:Hmm.
436
:I think one really important thing that came out of, mean, to a degree, these two riots
specifically, but more generally that came out of the experience of kind of almost
437
:continuous protests that was going on for like five years, basically between 1966 and at
least:
438
:um And then, you know, still continued beyond.
439
:um But was the sense that this is how
440
:you make your voice heard.
441
:And the young people who were largely like second generation Mexican-American or second
generation Puerto Rican, they've been born in the US.
442
:They'd watched their parents struggle and kind of fail and increasingly through the late
60s and into the 70s kind of failed to achieve the economic security that seemed on offer
443
:in these American cities.
444
:And so, you know, young people were really um galvanized and motivated and um seeking
increasingly to use education as a tool to help themselves get out of, you know, poverty
445
:conditions, ghetto neighborhoods.
446
:And this is another actually connection to um the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
447
:within a couple of years, colleges and universities began really trying, getting really
creative with trying to create access for black and brown students.
448
:And this was a kind of accelerator of youth activism and student movements.
449
:And of course there were, you know, student movements happening in other parts of society,
you know, like the white, mostly white.
450
:left and sort of left leaning college students, the anti-war movement, et cetera.
451
:And so um one, I would say like you could draw a line.
452
:It's not totally direct and you know, the kind of causal relationships here are um
multifaceted, not simple, but between these intensive years of protest,
453
:and the kind of activism that led to, for instance, the Mexican-American and other Latino
defense of affirmative action policies when they came under assault by the early to
454
:mid-1970s.
455
:And in fact, I've also recently published an article about this too.
456
:case that is best known as the test case for affirmative action in higher education in the
United States.
457
:This was the Bakke versus Regents of University California, 1977.
458
:That the kind of first wave of organizing and protest against the um the state, the
district court level decision in California.
459
:that came from Mexican Americans, Mexican American students, Mexican American faculty, and
then it quickly sort of galvanized Latinos all across the United States.
460
:Of course, there were African Americans who were, law professors and law students and
others who were working on this also and advocating for the maintaining of affirmative
461
:action.
462
:But again, this was an instance of the Latino participation in a really important civil
rights issue.
463
:not making it into the standard narrative of what happened in this civil rights era.
464
:So I just want to sort of highlight that as a uh follow on of the intensive period of
riots and also as a kind of echo of the uh invisibility that Latinos have.
465
:um
466
:fought against in US history.
467
:Yeah.
468
:Yeah.
469
:And I think, you on that note, you the two of you have probably set up the next 90
episodes of the podcast.
470
:There's so much to unpack from everything we've just discussed.
471
:And I realize we've only just really started to have the conversation that needs to be had
around this.
472
:But it's been a fascinating insight that is absolutely going to lead to many more
discussions on the podcast about this.
473
:And I can't thank you both enough for joining me.
474
:for anyone listening to the podcast that wants to learn more, I'm going to put links to
everything that we've mentioned in the show notes.
475
:So go and check all of that out.
476
:But if anyone wants to connect with either of you directly, where can they do that?
477
:Lauren.
478
:um I'm actually not on social media, but someone can email me at my Rutgers address.
479
:You just Google me at Rutgers and get my email address.
480
:I'd be delighted to correspond with anyone who's interested.
481
:Wonderful.
482
:not on social media so people can find me on UIC History Department's website and feel
free to reach out to me that way.
483
:Excellent.
484
:I am still kind of on social media, very tentatively on Blue Sky and LinkedIn.
485
:So search for my name and I'll pop up somewhere.
486
:And if any of you listening enjoy the podcast, please do remember as well to give us a
rating and a review wherever you are listening to this and give us a follow as well,
487
:because then all future episodes will just appear in your feed.
488
:And if you really like what we do and you want to support the show, you can do from as
little as one dollar.
489
:All the info is in the show notes for that.
490
:Thank you again to Lauren and Lillia for joining me for this.
491
:And thank you all so much for listening and goodbye.
