1. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” and “war on poverty” helped eliminate injustice and poverty, which made a life changing positive impact on the Mexican Americans. They established job-traiing programs (MDTA), Job Corps, Head Start, Upward Bound, and Volunteers in service to America (VISTA). In the Article “Goodbye America: The Chicano in the 1960’s, the text states “ Congress allocated $1.6 billion annually to eliminate poverty-an amount that, considering the 3-40 million poor living in the United States, did not go very far”(86). The text proves that by establishing these programs and eliminating poverty they were able to help many Mexican Americans that couldn’t afford to survive, as well as giving them the opportunity to continue their education. Many Chicanos were able to serve as board members, they developed a sense of political consciousness, and they realized that they had a voice in the government and the right to petition it.
2. North Americans had high hopes the President John Kennedy would get the country moving again. They had played a major role in Kennedy’s victory,” without their vote, Kennedy would have lost Texas and the election” (83). “Viva Kennedy” clubs gave JFK a victory in California and furnished a narrow win in Texas. The Mexican Americans felt that their vote had been crucial to Kennedy’s election, and “this gave them the illusion of power and acceptance in the world of gringo politics” (83).They felt that if they were elected a white president and that their votes would count towards his elections, they had the upper hand and were a part of Kennedy’s team and he would be in favor of the Mexican Americans.
3. Cesar Chavez began the Chicano Movement, “Chavez and the farmworkers gave Chicanos a cause, symbols, and a national space to claim their presence in the country’s Civil Rights Movement”(91).Chavez strategy was to maintain the unions moral authority by employing the civil disobedience and fasts to call attention to the cause. The strategy of civil disobedience was to actively refuse to obey unjust laws and injunctions. Chavez spent his childhood as a migrant worker, he became an organizer for the CSO, learning grassroots organizing methods. Huerta was born in a mining town in New Mexico, and was also a CSO organizer; Chavez and Huerta joined in forming the NFWA. Chavez made the farmworkers movement a crusade. The NFWA urged supported not to buy Schenely produced or DI Giorgio Grapes.
4. Their goal was to put an end to the discrimination and other injustices suffered b Chicano Students. Chicana college students like Vicki provided leadership, and Tanya a student organizer at Roosevelt High School and a junior encouraged her fellow students to boycott. The students demanded racist teachers to be removed, charging that school authorities had implemented a curriculum that purposely obscured the Chicanos’ culture and programed students to be content with low-skilled jobs. In 1967, there were barely any Spanish speaking teachers, “Whites made up 78 percent of the teachers, 91.4 percent of the administrators, and 54 percent of the student - more than 20 percent of the students were Latinos” (96).
5. Local activist Reies Lopez Tijerina formed La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (The Federal Alliance of Land Grants), he restored New Mexican land grants to the descendants of their Spanish colonial and Mexican owners. A basic premise of the Alianza’s demands was that people don’t “give away” their lands or rights in treaties. Tijerina lived a marginal existence became a preacher and wandered into northern New Mexico, where he witnessed the poverty of the people. Tijerina participated in the Poor Peoples Campaign, “threatening to pull the Chicano contingent out if black organizers did not treat them as equals” (102) and was later prisoned for seven months and kept him in isolated, “Tijerina became a symbol, convicted of political crimes rather than crimes against “society” (102).”
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