What Was The Chicano Movement

There had always been fluctuations in how Mexican immigrants have been received. During the Great Depression, when white individuals needed jobs, hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans were illegally deported, or as president Herbert Hoover put it, "repatriated" back to Mexico. During the second World War, with the American servicemen overseas, American companies needed labor, so they relied on Mexico for workers. The U.S. Government, in conjunction with big business, put together the Bracero Program. When we needed them, Mexicans were again welcomed into the Untied States, as a source of labor.

These workers were instrumental in keeping the war economy going. Under the "Bracero Program" thousands, perhaps millions, of immigrants from
The Chicano movement blossomed in the 1960s. During the movement, the majority of the activists focused on the most immediate issues confronting Mexican-Americans such as unequal education and employment opportunities, political disfranchisement, and police brutality. In the late 1960s, the Chicano movement brought the mass walkouts by high school students in Denver and East Los Angeles in 1968 and the Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles in 1970. An important civil rights activist was Cesar Chavez. Influenced by leaders such as Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Chavez wished to help migrant field workers of California in a peaceful manner. He created a union of migrant farm workers, the National Farm Workers Association, to fight for better working conditions. Cesar went to work in the fields to try to recruit workers to his union. Many workers didn't believe that the union would work and were afraid that they would potentially lose their jobs. However, the union began to grow slowly. One of Cesar's first major actions was to form a strike against grape farmers where him along with 67 other workers marched to Sacramento. It took several weeks and people gradually started joining the march, eventually gaining a crowd of thousands of workers to protest. In the end, the grape growers agreed to many of the worker's conditions of dignity, improved wages, and safety of migrant farm workers and signed a contract with the union. Harvest of Shame, presented by Edward R. Murrow, brought exposure to the plight of migrant agricultural workers and displayed what Americans were generally unbeknownst to: poverty and