Wayne State University: Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, Interview with Jorge Luis Chinea

Abstract

© 2021 by the University of Texas Press Under the banners of Brown, Black, and Red Power, they pushed back against the historical oppression and exclusion to which the Anglodominated system had subjected them and demanded cultural inclusion, fair treatment, a rightful share to a quality education, wellpaying jobs, decent housing, and participation in our democratic institutions of government. They voiced their just claims through mass protests, marches, boycotts, walkouts, sitins, and other expressions of civil disobedience. The creation of LEM reflected the LASED and New Detroit activists’ commitment to making a better world for the disenfranchised masses who languished from the combined effect of poverty, dilapidated homes, subtractive educational curricula, and unresponsive political systems. The LEM agenda entailed preparing a pool of socially conscious leaders to return to their marginalized communities equipped with the educational tools, practical skills, and connections necessary to make a real difference in the lives of impoverished residents. The reinvigorating influence of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s also energized the early efforts to challenge the status quo. The one iconic example that readily comes to mind, of course, is Dolores Huerta, of the United Farmworkers Union, whose prominent participation in organized labor contributed to the reevaluation of traditional gender roles within the Latino/a community. Eventually, the increasingly visible involvement of other Latinas in multiple public and private arenas fueled growing calls for replacing the divisive, oppressive machista paradigm with a genderinclusive approach. Members of El Movimiento, the Young Lords, and other sociopolitical movements of that era featured feminist critiques in their respective analyses of the reigning patriarchal social order. Despite the maleexclusive title of Latino En Marcha, two of its first coordinators, María TorresGuzmán and Isabel Salas, served as role models for countless young women who enrolled in the progressive educational experiment. Those who entered the program then or in the years to Wayne State University: Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, Interview with Jorge Luis Chinea