Youth Voices in El Movimiento

Many people associate the Colorado, Northern New Mexico, and southern Wyoming region that constitutes the Front Range of the Rocky Mountain West with the story of White men who tamed unsettled and seemingly empty lands in the shadow of the western gold rush and the Homestead Act (Cynthia Culver Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments, 2019). Yet there is also a story of movement from south to north that has shaped the area, as Spanish conquistadors in 1598 laid claim to this region’s land for the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Throughout the eighteenth and into the first half of the nineteenth century the territory was involved in disputes between the colonizing interests of Spain, the Mexican government seeking independence from Spain, the United States seeking to expand its territory westward, and the tribes that had originated here, including the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne, among others. These disputes erupted into the Mexican American war or what some scholars refer to as the U.S. Invasion of Mexico, an altercation that ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Hidalgo. With the treaty, those of Mexican and of Native American heritage who lived in the area were promised U.S. citizenship and land. Yet, with the influx of White settlers to the area, many of these earlier residents were denied those land grants or saw their lands dispossessed under the new government. Mexicans, Indigenous, and Mestizo (those of mixed Mexican and Indigenous heritage) who lived in regions where the border shifted or who later moved there have experienced significant social, economic, and political discrimination, and have sought various means of organizing to resist. The in-migration of migrants from Latin America and heightened issues of school segregation throughout the early twentieth century contributed to these ongoing tensions. By the 1960s, the Mexican American movement, El Movimiento, was born. 

While many are familiar with the roots of this movement in the work of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to establish the National Farm Workers Association in California, fewer know the stories of how young people in the Front Range region of the Rocky Mountains played a role in developing El Movimiento. Educators have pointed out that these stories warrant more attention in high school and university curricula (see Woo et al., 2020), yet few efforts have been undertaken to curate and experiment with the teaching of these materials in interdisciplinary curricula embracing community engagement. This project aims to address this gap, adopting as its theme the excavation of the significant role that young people of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming played in the development of El Movimiento and Chicano identity.

Fourteen faculty and staff members affiliated with the University of Denver’s Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (In)Equality (IRISE), and its Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program are collaborating to support this DPFF project, and several University of Denver faculty bring to this work strong backgrounds in Mexican American history and civil rights activities in the U.S. southwest. With extensive archival and oral history research, Elizabeth Escobedo (2013) authored From Coveralls to Zoot Suits, a book that examines how Mexican and Mexican American women of the southwestern U.S. pursued new opportunities in labor, youth subcultures, and personal relationships during the Second World War. Her work highlights the ways in which young Mexican American women’s personal acts of resistance contributed to their community’s larger fight for civil rights. Tracing the rise of tri-ethnic jurisprudence in public education, Tom Romero (2007) has explored the rise of Mexican American as a legal category emerging in court debates regarding not-White and not-Black status. Romero (2011) also has published on the role Colorado played in the national movement to assure the right to public education, even as the state’s structural and systemic inequities were already dividing the area along lines of race, class, and gender. As a legal scholar and historian, Romero (2011) also has traced the importance of water and water rights for the communities of the southwestern U.S., highlighting the disproportionate negative effect that the lack of water rights had on Mexican and Mexican American communities, providing a framework for understanding the struggles over water that are shaping the present and that promise to redraw the region’s future. Interpretive sociologist Lisa Martinez has also contributed to understandings of the contemporary Latino/a/x experience, with studies on Latino solidarity in the wake of immigration reform (2008, 2015), Latino participation in politics (2005, 2008, 2010), responses to legal reforms among undocumented youth (2014, 2021), and Latino work with community organizations (2011). 

Younger scholars at the University of Denver involved in DPFF are also contributing to the conversation on Mexican American history and lived experience. Carlos Jimenez (2021) has published on oral narratives he collected among Mexican American day laborers in Denver who are utilizing their mobile phones for sociality and memory. Lina Reznicek-Parrado (2022, 2020, 2015, 2013) has explored the ways that students view the teaching of the Spanish language among young heritage speakers, finding that although students report their use of “Spanglish,” they vehemently oppose its use in an academic context. Esteban Gomez (2018) has worked with Latinx, White, and Mestizo high school students to develop the acclaimed public exhibit, This is My Denver.Description text goes here

Other University of Denver faculty collaborating on this project have contributed to international scholarly research on youth involvement in political action and activism (Gordon 2009, 2017; Gordon and Taft 2010, 2013) and on the catalytic role storytelling can play among young people who are engaged in creating historically grounded forms of narrative expression (Beltran et al. 2017; Burciaga and Martinez 2017; Clark 2017; Clark and Marchi 2018; Jimenez and Clark 2020; Ramirez, Jimenez, and Clark, 2021, Romero 2002 and 2006). Scholars collaborating also have expertise in the relationships between narrative constructions and citizenship among Indigenous and Mexican American communities (Gomez 2015; Parker 2022, 2015; Swift 2020), in the relationships between music and civil rights efforts (Holland 2021), and in working within settings of community engagement (Ceron 2022; Clark 2016; Clark and Thompson 2021; DePrince et al. 2022; Martinez 2015; Rubenstein 2021). Thus, this project will engage students in work that is historically and intellectually grounded and that contributes to the development of their own learning within an interdisciplinary, community-based ethic of mutuality.

Mexican American, Indigenous, and Mestizo youth played a role in each of the key events that are the focus of this project and continue to take pride in El Movimiento’s role in contemporary struggles for racial justice. Students from differing racial-ethnic and geographic backgrounds in University of Denver classes therefore will be encouraged to work together to draw critical connections between these events of the past and contemporary efforts in educational and immigration reform. One such current effort involves the 2019 Colorado legislation introduced by State Representative Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez and signed into law by Colorado Governor Jared Polis that ensures the inclusion of the history of Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans in social studies courses in Colorado’s classrooms. Although the current project focuses on the development of interdisciplinary and experiential educational practices at the university level, DPFF colleagues aim to seek additional funds separately to develop these materials for Colorado high schools as educators put this new law into practice.