The next prodigiously rad group I’d like to call attention to is (drumroll please…) The Brown Berets! When I discovered this particular political group, I was doing research for activist efforts in Texas and saw that there was an active group of Brown Berets in Houston. This led me to finding a handful of other groups still organizing under this name and even one in my own neck of the woods in Watsonville, CA. And let me tell you, when I found this group my little brown activist heart seriously wept tears of reverence and joy for the pure badassery and dopeness of this movement. Although it should be noted that the Berets were critiqued for being male dominated and sexist (which I'm not clearly not fan of), I still think they're story is one worth telling. Here’s a little bit on what I found:
The Brown Berets
The Brown Berets arose during the Chicano movement or the Chicano Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, by a group of Chicano high school students in Los Angeles, CA who formed a organization by the name of the Young Citizens for Community Action. Eventually, the group changed their organization name to The Young Chicanos for Community Action (YCCA) and in 1967 at a meeting held at the Piranya Coffee House (which their org founded), decided to wear brown berets as a sign of unity and resistance against discrimination- for which they later coined their name (wikipedia.com).From their start, the Brown Berets sought to organize around fighting police harassment, inadequate public schools, inadequate health care, inadequate job opportunities, minority education issues, the lack of political representation, and the Vietnam War (wikipedia.com). By 1968, the Brown Berets had developed into a national organization with chapters founded all over the U.S.
Strikingly similar to the Black Panther Party (and most likely, highly informed by it) in both their attire and political interests, I wondered why I had never heard of the Brown Berets prior to my research this summer in the same way I had of the Panthers. The Black Panthers were widely discussed in many of my social justice focused classes throughout college and their activist legacy is one that is commonly referred to and modelled after in many organizing circles I’m a part of. If this is so, then why would the Brown Berets who nearly mirrored the Panthers not be as noteworthy? It’s true that maybe I could have been personally ignorant of the Berets but let me tell you, I’m certain I would have jumped at an opportunity in my educational experience to learn about a organizing group which was pretty much the Latinx equivalent of the Black Panthers. As someone who identifies as Filipinx and probably some mix of Latinx, I have always been especially adamant about finding political role models as unapologetically brown, proud, and militant as the Berets.
It could very well be that the Brown Berets were not as visible in radical histories because they ostensibly lived in the shadows of the Black Panther Party. Nevertheless, this doesn’t prove to make them any less radical. For instance, one political action of theirs which I found quite remarkable was their takeover of a plot of land in Logan Heights (a neighborhood in San Diego) in 1970 to protest the projected building of a highway patrol substation. That plot of land is now called Chicano Park. That same year, the Berets organized the first Chicano Moratorium and waged a march in Los Angeles that drew 30,000 attendees and resulted in the death of 3 Chicano activists. Another impressively epic protest they waged was a 24 day occupation of Catalina Island in 1972 where 26 Berets claimed the island for Mexico. The Berets were truly doing some high profile organizing and as a result were eventually infiltrated and disbanded by government forces including the FBI and the LAPD. The fact that they were leading such provocative, courageous organizing which is now seldom known of or remembered is something which alludes to the erasure of many POC’s radical histories.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that the Black Panther Party is largely represented in activist cultures and histories because of the awesome revolutionary power it yielded and the true merit of their organizing. Still, I don’t want to underemphasize the absolute importance of telling the stories of other marginalized groups and identities in these histories as well. It’s still very difficult for me to find other rad Filipinx activists or API people in leadership in organizing, and I think this is largely because we still lack adequate representation and visibility in rad culture. Finding the Brown Berets for me, was a step towards widening the visibility of politicized, marginalized identities and expanding the scope of what radical activism can look like. Viva la Revolution!
