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The 1960s Revolution: Native Americans and Chicanos [1]
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Date: 2025-06-27
Native Americans and Chicanos were part of the 1960s revolution. Both were seeking civil and other rights that had been long denied to them.
Native American Resistance and Red Power: The 1960s witnessed a resurgence of Native American activism, often referred to as the Red Power movement. Indigenous peoples across the U.S. mobilized to resist centuries of colonization, reclaim sovereignty, enforce treaty rights, and protect their cultural and spiritual lifeways. This era of activism marked a shift from passive endurance to militant assertion of Native identity and rights. After five centuries of assimilation, Native Americans began the complex process of de-assimilation—a reclaiming of language, ceremony, governance, and memory long suppressed or outlawed by U.S. policy.
This resistance emerged in a cultural landscape hostile to Native identity. Television Westerns, such as The Lone Ranger (1949–1957), Gunsmoke (1955–1975), and Bonanza (1959–1973), occupied the white American imagination with a faux-historical, media-fueled hypernormalization. These shows created repetitive moral universes where white heroes dispensed frontier justice and Native peoples were either vanishing relics, loyal sidekicks, or violent obstacles to progress. In a country where most white Americans had no direct contact with Native people, media became their primary lens, one shaped by caricature and myth. These portrayals erased the living realities of Native Americans, making them invisible in the present and relegating them to the past, while absolving the dominant culture of guilt over genocide, land theft, or broken treaties.
At the policy level, Native people were also under siege. The Indian Termination Policy, active from 1953 to 1968, sought to end federal recognition of tribes, dissolve reservations, sell off communally held lands, eliminate federal services (education, healthcare, housing), and relocate Native individuals to urban centers under the Relocation Act of 1956. While the policy targeted around 100 tribes, 61 were actually terminated, affecting approximately 12,000 individuals. Resistance to termination galvanized Native political action, as many tribes fought to restore their federal recognition—a struggle that succeeded for some but left others still unrecognized today. This era helped ignite a widespread return to sovereignty, legal activism, and cultural revival.
Native peoples also turned to direct action. In the mid-1960s, Northwest tribes such as the Nisqually and Puyallup engaged in fish-ins to protest the violation of fishing rights promised in 19th-century treaties. These acts of civil disobedience, which often led to arrest, drew national attention. Their legal efforts culminated in a landmark victory in U.S. v. Washington (1974), affirming the right of tribes to 50% of the harvestable fish in their traditional waters.
In 1968, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minneapolis to address the growing crisis of urban police violence and racial discrimination against Native people. While its origins were urban, AIM quickly evolved into a national force advocating for treaty rights, cultural revitalization, land reclamation, and de-assimilation. AIM would play a central role in Native resistance throughout the 1970s.
One of the most symbolic acts of the era was the Occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971). After the prison was closed in 1963 and the site declared surplus federal land, a group called the Indians of All Tribes, led in part by Mohawk activist Richard Oakes, invoked the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which stated that unused federal land should revert to Native use. The occupation began with 89 people but eventually involved 400 to 600 Indigenous participants, many of them students. Though ultimately removed by federal authorities, the 19-month occupation galvanized Indigenous activism, brought national media attention to broken treaties, and inspired a new generation of Native leaders and movements.
As the dominant media continued to distort Native identity, a few counter-narrative films attempted to challenge the myth. Cheyenne Autumn (1964), directed by John Ford, a creator of the traditional Western movie, dramatized the 1878–79 Cheyenne Exodus and presented Native Americans not as aggressors, but as victims of betrayal and neglect. Though flawed, Ford called it an attempt to make amends for his earlier portrayals. Similarly, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), directed by Abraham Polonsky, dramatized the 1909 search for a Paiute man in California. The film critiqued racism and hysteria in the treatment of Native peoples, offering a rare cinematic portrayal of Native dignity and injustice.
Of course, Native Americans can be romanticized. Still, more often than not, they have been stereotyped in terribly destructive ways, stereotypes that justified their inhuman treatment by the dominant white Christian culture.
The Red Power movement of the 1960s marked a profound turning point in Native American history—a reckoning with erasure, injustice, and misrepresentation. Native Americans were no longer willing to be cast as relics, criminals, or caricatures. Through occupations, court cases, civil disobedience, and cultural revival, they demanded recognition not as victims but as sovereign peoples with distinct histories, rights, and futures. Against the backdrop of a hypernormalized media fantasy that comforted the dominant culture, real Native voices reemerged—loud, proud, and rooted in survival. The legacy of 1960s Native activism laid the foundation for the self-determination, education, and environmental justice movements that continue today.
Chicanos and El Movimiento: The Chicano Movement, also known as El Movimiento, emerged in the 1960s as a powerful response to the long-standing marginalization, discrimination, and cultural erasure experienced by Mexican Americans. The movement sought to reclaim cultural identity, fight for labor and educational rights, recover lost lands, and gain meaningful political representation.
César Chávez and Dolores Huerta began their activism as community organizers with the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Latino civil rights group founded in 1947 in California. Chávez eventually rose to become the CSO’s national director. However, in 1962, both he and Huerta resigned after the organization refused to address the exploitation of farmworkers. That same year, they co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) in Delano, California, at the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, to organize Mexican American farm laborers. Both Chávez and his parents had worked in the fields, and although Huerta’s father had also done farm labor, he later became a union activist and state legislator in New Mexico.
The Bracero Program (1942–1964) had brought millions of Mexican laborers to work in U.S. agriculture as a cheap and tightly controlled workforce. Chávez and Huerta criticized the program for undermining wages, enabling poor working conditions, and obstructing union organizing. They supported the Bracero workers themselves, but not the system that exploited them. Chávez compared the program to “legalized slavery,” and after it ended, he remarked, “The Bracero Program was a way for growers to keep farmworkers poor and powerless. Its end gave us a chance to organize.” Although the program ended in 1964, undocumented labor from Mexico increased in the years that followed.
In 1965, the NFWA joined a strike initiated by Filipino farmworkers, organized under the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), against table grape growers in Delano. While some smaller growers quickly settled and signed union contracts, larger growers resisted for years. In 1966, the NFWA and AWOC merged to form the United Farm Workers (UFW).
Chávez and Huerta launched a nationwide table grape boycott with support from churches, unions, civil rights groups, students, and volunteers. The boycott became one of the most successful in U.S. history, shifting the battlefield from the fields of California to grocery stores and family dinner tables across North America. While Chávez, a vocal advocate of nonviolence, became the public face of the movement, Huerta handled much of the logistics, outreach, and contract negotiations. Her rallying cry, “Sí, se puede” (“Yes, we can”), became an enduring slogan of empowerment. The boycott culminated in 1970, when about 26 major grape growers signed contracts with the UFW, agreeing to improved wages, benefits, pesticide protections, and formal union recognition.
The question of land rights also galvanized Chicano activism. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the U.S.–Mexico War, transferred vast territories to the United States, including all of California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and portions of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Texas. Articles VIII and IX of the treaty promised that Mexican citizens in these regions—around 60,000 people—would retain their property and be allowed to become U.S. citizens. In practice, however, most Mexican landholders lost their property, much like the dispossession of Native American tribes through broken treaties.
After researching land dispossession in the 1950s, Reies López Tijerina founded La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) in 1963 in New Mexico to advocate for the restoration of land grants to descendants of original Mexican landowners. In 1967, Tijerina led the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid, a dramatic and controversial attempt to arrest a district attorney who had blocked Alianza’s efforts. Though it became violent and failed to recover any land, the raid brought national attention to unresolved treaty violations and became a defining moment in the Chicano struggle for justice.
In March 1968, the East L.A. Walkouts (also known as Blowouts) saw more than 15,000 Chicano high school students walk out of classes across five East Los Angeles schools for a week. They protested underfunded schools, high dropout rates, discriminatory disciplinary practices, punishment for speaking Spanish, lack of Chicano teachers or history in the curriculum, and tracking Mexican American students into vocational rather than academic paths.
The institutional response was slow and uneven, but the walkouts had a lasting impact. They helped catalyze the creation of Chicano Studies programs at colleges and universities, and over the following decade, many schools introduced bilingual education and culturally relevant curricula.
In 1969, students formed MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) to implement El Plan de Santa Barbara—an 80-page manifesto calling for Chicano educational reform, cultural pride, and community empowerment. (Source:
https://archives.calstate.edu/concern/archives/jh343t27b) MEChA grew rapidly, establishing over 400 chapters at high schools, community colleges, and universities and organizing thousands of students across the country.
The La Raza Unida Party, founded in 1970 in Texas, responded to the exclusion of Chicanos from the U.S. political system. It offered an alternative to the two-party system and promoted bilingual education, economic self-determination, and community control of institutions. While its influence was strongest in South Texas, the party played a significant role in building Chicano political consciousness nationwide.
The Chicano Movement confronted the hypernormalized illusion that Mexican Americans were passive, apolitical, and culturally marginal. This illusion had been perpetuated by public institutions, the media, and dominant narratives that ignored the depth of Chicano history and grievance. El Movimiento dismantled this illusion by reclaiming a rich tradition of indigenous resistance, land defense, labor organizing, and student activism.
Through strikes, boycotts, walkouts, legal challenges, and the formation of new political organizations, the movement exposed the gap between American ideals and the lived experiences of Mexican Americans. It forced the nation to acknowledge the long history of exclusion and the urgent need for structural change—both in the fields and classrooms, at the ballot box, and in national memory.
The Native American and Chicano movements of the 1960s represented two parallel uprisings against centuries of marginalization, dispossession, and cultural erasure. Though distinct in history and focus, both movements emerged from communities long silenced by dominant narratives—narratives that erased Native peoples from the present and reduced Mexican Americans to outsiders within their own ancestral lands. Against this erasure, both groups demanded to be seen, heard, and respected on their own terms.
Through direct action, legal resistance, cultural revival, and political organizing, Indigenous and Chicano activists reshaped the landscape of American civil rights. They reclaimed language and identity, challenged the falsified histories presented in classrooms and media, and insisted on self-determination over assimilation. In doing so, they disrupted the comfort of dominant cultural myths and forced the nation to confront the legacies of conquest, labor exploitation, broken treaties, and institutional exclusion.
The movements of the 1960s were not merely calls for inclusion—they were declarations of sovereignty, dignity, and presence. Their legacy endures today in the ongoing struggles for tribal recognition, immigrant rights, educational equity, and cultural preservation. They remind us that history is not static—it is contested terrain, and those once written out of the national story have long since begun writing themselves back in.
Day 159: days left to January 20, 2029: 1,303 days
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