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• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 In Living Color: Chicano Televisual Media at the Dawn of the Movement 3 image_header 2025-01-07T05:48:37+00:00

  
  by Desirée J. Garcia

  Dartmouth College
  
  Abstract

  Making Chicano Media
  Chicano
  Chicano and Chicano Media in the early 1970s
  “Producciones Chicanas Presents”

  Making Chicano Media

  Working as an associate producer for WGBH Boston in the early 2000s, I was part of a small group of filmmakers who endeavored to persuade the nationally broadcast American history series American Experience to produce programming for and about Latinos. We succeeded twice. The series produced two hour-long historical documentaries—Zoot Suit Riots, which aired on March 1, 2002, and Remember the Alamo, which aired on February 2, 2004. Both films revisited seminal events in Latino history: the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial (1942) and Zoot Suit Riots (1943) in the first and the Battle of the Alamo (1836) in the second. Both films were created by a Latino production team, a rarity then as now. But the path toward completion was not simple for either film. While we had extensive Latino scholarship to draw upon, synthesizing that scholarship for mainstream consumption proved to be a hindrance to the objective of exploring the complexity of Latinos and their history. 

  One example is from a screening of an early edit of Zoot Suit Riots. We hoped the film would explore the interwoven dynamics of race, gender, and citizenship that led to a mass trial and conviction of Latino and Latina youth and the ensuing race riots. When we presented the film to WGBH executives, however, they responded with confusion about the mere presence of so many Mexicans in Los Angeles. In response, we included a section on the history of Mexican migration to the city and lost much of the complexity of the film as a result. Given that American Experience’s audience demographics were—and still are—majority white and middle class, we realized that in order to educate viewers on relatively isolated events in Latino history, a more general history of Latinos would have to be told first. And in keeping with the style and form of American Experience films, Zoot Suit Riots and Remember the Alamo deliver their content in accessible language. Using talking heads, a male narrator—actor Hector Elizondo in both instances—and archival footage and photographs, the films strive for objectivity in tone, scholarly authority in content, and legitimacy in their argument that Latino history is American history. Despite the gains made by Latino scholars and the turn toward multiculturalism in the 1990s, it was clear to us that an argument had to be made for the viability of Latino content on national television, and to win over a general audience, that content should be delivered in the most accessible and straightforward means possible. 

  Watching the series Chicano, made three decades before the films on American Experience, I am struck by how earlier generations of Latino television producers struggled with these same issues. Produced by Sal Castro, a teacher and one of the leaders of the East Los Angeles walkouts (1968), and Frank Cruz, then associate professor of Chicano studies at Cal State Long Beach, Chicano (1971–1972) represents a landmark event in the history of Latino media.¹

  Like the American Experience films I worked on, Chicano was broadcast nationally. It first aired “in living color” in Los Angeles on KNBC but also showed on television screens in Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. In this way, it was both local and national in its orientation, attempting to educate audiences on the history and contemporary issues facing Chicanos—a term that the series uses self-consciously to reflect a new political and cultural consciousness for Mexican Americans. One of the earliest attempts to define and shape Latino history for television audiences, Chicano represents a moment early in the Chicano movement when Latino scholars, activists, and producers recognized the importance of televisual media to the telling of Latino stories. Cruz and his fellow Latino collaborators knew this was a “unique opportunity” that would broaden their audience beyond the classroom. They viewed television as the key to “inform literally thousands” about the “Latino experience and to explain what a Chicano was.”² The series’ scope—to tell the history of the Chicano from before American and Spanish settlement to the present—was ambitious. Its effects would be long-lasting. Cruz, the host, would go on to serve as president of the board of directors for Latino Public Broadcasting, an organization that funds and advocates for Latino programming on PBS, including the two American Experience films mentioned here and many, many others. 

  Chicano

  The series consists of twenty episodes approximately thirty minutes long; the first program aired on July 5, 1971.³ Screening the day after America’s day of independence, the episode “Aztlan” had special resonance as it educated audiences on the history of the present-day American Southwest, which once was the homeland of the pre-Columbian Aztecs. It appeared at 5:00 p.m. in Los Angeles, just as Angelenos were sitting down to their dinner. Although we do not have audience demographics for the series, the large number of episodes that extended over two years of programming, combined with its national syndication, indicates that NBC considered Chicano to be a critical part of its summer lineup. 

  Cruz and Castro created the series at a time when the United States was in turmoil. The assassination of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 and 1968, respectively, set off a firestorm of protests against racism and witnessed the rise of cultural nationalism in which peoples of color rejected the assimilationist narratives of the past. Latinos were among them. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” Mexican Americans who radically embraced and celebrated their differences from white America, they identified a range of issues where the United States was failing them. They were galvanized by the efforts to organize farmworkers by Cesar Chavez, Gil Padilla, and Dolores Huerta, who jointly founded the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee along with Filipino laborers led by Larry Itliong. 

  But beyond the rights of workers in the fields, Chicanos pointed to extensive, systemic forms of racism and inequality in all realms of life, including education, employment, the writing of American history, culture, and the media. Many scholars trace the birth of the Chicano movement to two seminal events: the East Los Angeles walkouts of 1968, when thousands of students and teachers protested their discriminatory treatment in the public school system, and the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, a mass demonstration against the disproportionate number of Chicanos who were drafted into the Vietnam War.⁴ By the time Chicano aired the following summer, the grievances had reached a boiling point, and the need for a broader understanding of Chicanos and their objectives was paramount.

  Responding to the outcry, KNBC turned to Castro, Cruz, and other Latino scholars to produce programming that addressed issues of social responsibility. As Cruz notes in his autobiography, it is likely that the station merely sought to “justify their license renewal” or demonstrate their commitment to employee diversity as per the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.⁵ The series had a low budget, and its scholars, including Cruz, did not receive any pay for their work. Nevertheless, what they created was a significant documentation of a tumultuous but generative moment in time that reached thousands in the early 1970s and remains a unique televisual program to this day. 

  “Aztlan,” the first episode, clearly demarcates the connection between Chicanos and the American Southwest. As with the episodes to follow, Cruz first addresses the television audience. He sits behind a desk, dressed in a suit and tie, with an indigenous Aztec symbol as the backdrop. His credentials as an associate professor at Cal State Long Beach appear on the lower third of the screen as he introduces the series:

  I will be your host for the next several weeks on a series of programs on the subject of the Mexican American or Chicano. The subjects and people we will be considering are as old as the intrepid explorer who first crossed the Bering Straits 30,000 years ago and as recent as tomorrow’s immigrant who will legally walk across the United States and Mexico border to join relatives in the United States. The people are as rural as a mountain villager of New Mexico and as mobile and urban as a United States congressman. The series will include in its programming the contributions our ancestors made to the area and consequently to American culture.

  Cruz’s opening remarks are oriented toward a non-Chicano audience unfamiliar with the history of Mexicans in the United States and their heterogeneity. He specifies that the series will focus on the “Mexican American or Chicano,” suggesting a continuity between the two terms in order to lend the latter intelligibility. And he dramatically juxtaposes the many types of Chicanos to be found in the United States, identifying the sort that most Americans would be familiar with—the “immigrant”—alongside those who are not so familiar, including the “explorer,” who predates American settlement, and the “United States congressman.” Cruz emphasizes the legal status of the immigrant in an effort to counter the stereotype of the “wetback,” or illegal Mexican, that had attracted outsized media attention and public uproar. 

  In each episode, Cruz dialogues with a guest host, typically an academic from the earliest Mexican American and Chicano studies programs in the country. They include anthropologist José B. Cuéllar (University of California, Los Angeles), sociologist Tomás Martinez (Stanford), psychologist Manuel Ramírez (University of California, Riverside), historians Richard Romo and Carlos Arce (San Fernando Valley State College) and Federico Sánchez (Cal State Long Beach), and labor organizer and scholar Ernesto Galarza, as well as local administrators and activists. Taken together, they provide historical context, rooted in scholarship, regarding the Chicano’s evolution in American society. 

  At a moment when the Chicano movement had succeeded in creating an entirely new field of study, the episodes are remarkable for the ways they deeply mine the complex dynamics of race, citizenship, and belonging. The episode “Barrio Life and Cultural Democracy,” for example, examines how young Mexican American children experience a bicultural existence, which has long been demonized by the American public school system and met with confusion by Mexican families. The episode examines the structural inequalities of public education and segregation in housing as contributing factors to social marginalization and goes further to demonstrate how embracing bicultural identities, including the encouragement of bilingualism and cultural heritage in schools, can yield positive results for Mexican American children. The episode, and indeed the entire series’ emphasis on structural systems of power rather than certain problematic individuals, is in keeping with the Chicano movement’s broader agenda. But it also represents a sincere effort to deliver a more complex portrait of society—and the Chicano’s place within it—to mainstream America. It does so with a carefully crafted visual narrative that is in dialogue with, and counterpoint to, the way that televisual media had presented the Chicano movement up to that point. 

  Chicano and Chicano Media in the early 1970s

  Chicano fits into the loosely defined genre of “newsfilm” on television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While newsfilm was often a reference to the raw footage that television reporters used to create their news programming, it was also, as Chicano exhibits, a reference to short-form documentaries in which producers curated archival footage and images and edited them alongside talking heads and interviews to create a cohesive examination of a particular topic. The local television news station—KNBC Los Angeles in this case—played an important role in supporting and hosting such programming, giving it a reach that was simultaneously regional and national. While televisual news media often falls outside the scope of film and media studies, Chicano reveals how paying attention to newsfilm allows us to examine some of the earliest Latino media for the mainstream in a time well before Latinos had access to mainstream film production.⁶

  Positive depictions of people of color were still rare in the early 1970s. And the stories of people of color, their long journey through racism and other forms of inequality, were rarer still. For context, it was not until ABC premiered Roots in 1977 that Americans first experienced a comprehensive treatment of the history of Black Americans on their television screens. As Nielsen ratings confirmed, white Americans were eager for such programming by the late 1970s, having experienced a resurgence in immigrant and ethnic pride over the course of the decade.⁷ But at the time of Chicano’s premiere, Americans were still reeling from the ongoing protest movements by a range of groups, but perhaps most visibly by people of color.

  Chicanos taking angrily to the streets were given significant airtime by major networks. With the exception of television’s attraction to Chavez and his nonviolent grape strike—which, as Randy Ontiveros argues, fits into the more familiar type of the “humble Mexican” in the American popular imagination—it was the out-of-control and violent brown body that received attention, if any was paid, in the Chicano movement. As Ontiveros observes, “activities such as voter education and antipoverty programming do not televise well, which meant that apart from the grape strike and its iconic leader [Chavez], the networks usually only ran stories that involved rioting, vandalism, and other forms of public disorder.” Television, as a result, mediated Chicanos as a violent mass, “threatening to bring the American experiment to an end.”⁸ Even a relatively benign series, The Mexican American, broadcast by NBC the summer before Chicano, led with an inflammatory statement by the mayor of San Antonio about the innate inability of Mexicans to be successful in American life.⁹ Chicano was truly unique for its perspective on and by Latinos in an extended, multipart televisual program.

  “Producciones Chicanas Presents”

  Cruz and his producers supported another of the Chicano movement’s goals—to both interrogate and take control of the media. The last episode to be aired in 1971, “Stereotyping in the Mass Media,” focused precisely on this issue. While this episode explains how mass media, from Frito Bandito to children’s programming, revels in stereotype, it is the series as a whole that carries out the movement’s goal of creating Latino-produced media.¹⁰ It does so in conversation with the ways that television has depicted the movement up to that point—namely, without context, complexity, or respect. 

  The series offers a corrective visually and aurally from its very beginning. The opening title sequence is a montage of archival footage depicting mostly Latinos, and in particular Latino youth, marching in protest at schools and walking down city streets. A compilation of footage from the walkouts and the Chicano Moratorium, the opening sequence would seem to reinforce the media’s correlation between brown bodies and chaos. And yet a closer look at the footage shows that these are peaceful and orderly protests. The participants, both male and female, march in formation or walk across fields and streets carrying their schoolbooks. Chicano animates this sequence with a tuneful and upbeat soundtrack of wind and string instruments that suggests an optimistic, rather than threatening, tone. Far from the out-of-control masses, the series presents a fervent and insistent protest movement, but one that is ultimately law-abiding and firmly within the rights of all Americans.

  The series also works to assign a diversity of faces to the movement. Out of the undifferentiated groups portrayed in the title sequence comes an attention to individuals. Using medium shots and close-ups, Chicano frames Cruz and his Latino guests so they are made accessible to American audiences. These guests are experts, the series is quick to explain through Cruz’s commentary and with the use of lower-third identifications of the guest’s name, degree, and academic affiliation. Furthermore, the majority of these guests are dressed formally in a suit and tie, like Cruz himself, revealing themselves to be civilized, intelligent, rational, and educated. But strategically, their commitment to the movement and Mexican culture is firmly established, as we see from the Aztec symbol that constitutes the backdrop for their commentary and their complex descriptions of historical context and the Chicano movement’s fight for equality. This fight, the series reveals, is not led by one man or about a single issue. It is a fight by many for a range of solutions to problems that have been years in the making. Framed by the same opening montage, each episode takes the viewer on a journey from what they are familiar with—the protests of nameless people of color—to a methodical examination of who those protestors are and why they do what they do.
  Chicano complicates and broadens our understanding of the history of Latino media production in all of its living color. Created at the dawn of the Chicano movement and the beginning of Chicano studies as an academic field, the series positions itself in dialogue with the often harmful depictions and willful neglect of the media. While its visual language is not as radical or multimodal as the works of other Latino media productions such as Luis Valdez’s I Am Joaquín (1969) or Sylvia Morales’s Chicana (1979), it nevertheless occupies a significant place in the history of Latino storytelling. It set out to correct mainstream American viewers’ understanding of people of color and a complex social movement—no small feat, given the stakes.

  
  A list of links relevant to this essay can be found here.¹¹
  
  Desirée Garcia is an Associate Professor in the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Department at Dartmouth. She is the author of two books, The Movie Musical (2021) and The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (2014), both published by Rutgers University Press. She has a PhD in American Studies from Boston University and BA in History from Wellesley College. Garcia has also worked as an Associate Producer for American Experience/PBS and as an actress in the first feature film by director Damien Chazelle (La La Land), the original musical film called Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009).
  
  In Living Color: Chicano Televisual Media at the Dawn of the Movement © 2025 by Desirée J. Garcia is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.