Chicano Moratorium

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The Chicano Moratorium, formally known as the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, was a movement of Chicano anti-war activists that built a broad-based but fragile coalition of Mexican-American groups to organize opposition to the Vietnam War. Led by activists from local colleges and members of the "Brown Berets", a group with roots in the high school student movement that staged walkouts in 1968, the coalition peaked with an August 29, 1970 march in East Los Angeles that drew 30,000 demonstrators.

The most lasting impact of the movement was the death of Rubén Salazar, a journalist with the Los Angeles Times and local radio station KMEX known for his reporting on civil rights and police brutality. Salazar was killed by a tear gas canister fired by a member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department into the Silver Dollar Café at the conclusion of the August 29 rally, leading some to claim that he had been targeted. While an inquest found that his death was a homicide, the deputy sheriff who fired the shell was not prosecuted.

The NCMC collapsed in the wake of that rally, which the Los Angeles Police Department broke up, arresting hundreds of demonstrators. The LAPD subsequently infiltrated agents provocateurs into the group and raided its offices. The organization dissolved by 1971.

[edit] Sources

• Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! : the history of the Mexican American civil rights movement, Houston, Texas : Arte Público Press, 1997. ISBN 1-55885-201-8