Home Is Where the Harm Is
The cops shoot Louie Pineda in the back.
It happens in the early morning hours of July 12, 1967. Police respond to a report of car prowling at 1450 Mariposa St. The cops claim to shoot Louie in the chest, but the autopsy shows the bullet enters the body through the boy’s back.
Louis Timothy Pineda is dead at seventeen.
Westsiders hang “Justice for Louie” signs in their windows and protest in the streets. In the fall, a judge rules the police-shooting as self-defense.
It is 1967, and civil rights protests in the deep south extend to cities like Newark, Detroit. and Chicago. Farm workers organizing alongside Cesar Chavez launch a national grape boycott. Land Rights activist Reies Lopez Tijerina seizes the courthouse at Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico.
Hundreds of thousands of people march to protest the escalating war in Viet Nam.
In the fall, Che Guevara is captured and executed, but intensified liberation movements continued to erupt all over the Global South.
Local movement actions gain traction.
In 1968, a women-led strike against the Kitayama floral plant in Brighton, Colorado brings labor and student organizers together; the strike galvanizes the movement and builds momentum.
In 1968, Denver Eastsider Corky Gonzales, a former boxer and Democratic politician, creates the Crusade for Justice, a multi-issue Chicano civil rights, cultural, and educational organization. Gonzales becomes a leader in the national Chicano Civil Right Movement and the Crusade becomes an active force in Colorado movement politics.
In Denver’s Westside (e.g., Auraria and the neighborhoods south of West Colfax, La Alma, and Lincoln Park), discontent grows. Neighbors are weary of police violence, housing discrimination, school segregation, and political exclusion.
The racist circumstances that Westsiders face force them into tight-knit and collaborative units. Like all communities of color, they utilize reciprocity and solidarity not only to survive but to advance their communities. In response to marginalization, they create their own infrastructure and community institutions.
Finding Our Way
The Mexican American generation, the first generation born in the United States, is eager to participate in public life, and the civic institutions they create reflect their commitment to advancing civil rights.
They belong to League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the American GI Forum. Families who migrate to Denver from southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico belong to La Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos (SPMDTU).
Churches like St. Cajetan’s become sites for progressive organizing especially after Vatican II. Liberation theology resonates for Westsiders and the mandate informs labor organizing, activism against police brutality, and resistance to displacement.
White flight in the 1950s creates an opportunity for progressive churches to fill space formerly occupied by conservative white churches who follow their parishioners to the suburbs. The Denver Inner City Parish founded by Mennonites in 1962 becomes a neighborhood hub, a site for organizing, a sanctuary for activists, and an engine for progressive, community-based programs.
Westsiders leverage an influx of resources from the War on Poverty programs to transform the Auraria Community Center and to sprout myriad community organizing projects, including the Westside Improvement Association, which in turn informs the Westside Coalition and the Westside Action Program.
Before the movement boils over, Westsiders are already passionately resisting displacement in Auraria, circulating petitions and testifying at city council meetings. They boycott grapes and picket grocery stores. Westside students increasingly challenge school discrimination and begin staging small protests and sit ins at West High School and feeder schools.
They organize to oppose the egregious police harassment and constant brutality, only punctuated by the death of Louie Pineda.
The Chicano Movement does not make Westsiders into political animals. They have always been resilient, resourceful and keen to engage. When circumstances converge and the movement ignites, they have already built a durable edifice to support it.
Humans have always been willing to fight not just for survival but for places, communities, rituals and ways of life. In response to marginalization, Westsiders built a community. The neighborhood surrounding St. Cajetan’s church was the largest Spanish speaking enclave in the city. Westsiders were unwilling to let social arrangements that sustained them to be destroyed.
The Chicano Movement added dimension to an existing concern for culture. It named culture, the reclaiming of narratives, and authentic knowledge of lineages as a source of power. The Chicano Movement was propelled forward by a rediscovery of roots, language, and cultural heritage and defined by artistic expression. Chicanos would no longer accept the narratives thrust upon them. They would not only reclaim their history and assert their right to know and practice their culture, but they would also demand that others respect them, acknowledge their rights, and accept them as equals on their own terms.
