Community Service Organizations: The Chicano Civil Rights Movement

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mutual aid societies and other

associations in Mexican American communities advocated for the rights of

community members and provided social solidarity. In 1911, the First Mexican

Congress attempted to unify the groups under a national organization. The assembly

resolved to promote educational equality and civil rights for Mexican Americans,

themes that would reemerge in the Chicano civil rights movement of the mid-1960s.

Between the 1930s and the 1950s, numerous local, regional, and national

organizations were socially and politically active in promoting the rights of Mexican

Americans. A few key organizations included the Community Service Organizations

(CSO), the
LULAC was involved in several landmark civil rights cases

including Mendez v. Westminster of 1947, which legally ended the segregation of

Mexican American children in California schools. LULAC was also involved in

Hernandez v. Texas of 1954, which affirmed the 14th Amendment rights of Mexican

Americans to due process and equal protection under the law.

The 1960s Chicano movement criticized these earlier organizations as largely urban,

middle class, and assimilationist, who neglected laborers, students, and recent

migrants. Like other ethnic social movements of the time, the Chicano movement

embraced the culture and identity of Mexico. Leaders of the movement initiated

many legal and political maneuvers, union strikes, marches, and student protests.

Cesar Estrada Chavez (1927-93) joined the CSO in California as a community

organizer in 1952. He rose to the position of regional director by 1958. Chavez

resigned from the CSO in 1962 when they voted not to support the Agricultural

Workers Association led by a former CSO founding member, Dolores Huerta.

Together, Chavez and Huerta formed the National Farm Workers Association, which

later became the United Farm Workers of America. Chavez became famous in
In the 1980s he led protests against the use of

dangerous pesticides in grape farming. Chavez became a symbol of the movement

and was supported by other unions, clergy, student activists, and politicians such as

Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He died in 1993, and in the years since, he has been

honored by the naming of many streets, schools, and community centers, as well as

with murals and a commemorative stamp.

The civil rights movements of the 1960s established legal and political rights of

minority ethnic groups in the United States. The Chicano movement also had the

effect of broadening the class structure of existing Mexican American social and

political organizations to recognize migrants, laborers, and urban youth. It also

brought about a reversal of the assimilationist goals of previous decades and an

acute awareness of Chicano identity and nationalism. Several of the institutions of

that period are still active today, including numerous Chicano and Mexican American

Studies programs at major universities that began as a result of those earlier student

protests. Vestiges of the movement were also evident in the marches and rallies of

the National Day of Action for Immigrant Rights on April 10,