Latina/o Communists, Activism, and the FBI (PDF)

Latina/o Communists, Activism, and the FBI during the Chicana/o and New Communist Movements Author(s): Eddie Bonilla Source: Southern California Quarterly , Spring 2022, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Spring 2022), pp. 83- 127 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Historical Society of Southern California Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27194916 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Historical Society of Southern California and University of California Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Southern California Quarterly This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Latina /o Communists, Activism, and the FBI during the Chicana /o and New Communist Movements By Eddie Bonilla Abstract: T his article examines the origins of the predominantly California-based Chicana/o Marxist-Leninist organization known as the August 29th Movement from its founding in 1974 through 1978, when it merged with other communist groups of color. Emerging from popular Chicana/o movement organizations, the ATM joined a long, radical tra- dition of Latina/os engaging with ideas of Marxism and communism. In joining this radical tradition, however, ATM members came under the watchful eyes of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI used a com- bination of anti-foreignism, anti-communism, and anti-radicalism to mon- itor the ATM and upend its anti-imperial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist platform like it did other Latina/o leftists throughout the twentieth cen- tury. State surveillance hindered how leftist multiracial coalitions could recruit potential members, constraining these coalitions’ growth as they adopted security measures to defend against infiltration. This article first provides an overview of twentieth-century moments of repression towards Latina/o communists followed by discussions on the origins of the ATM and the bureau’s investigation of the organization indicating a continuity of surveillance. In telling this history, this article recovers a genealogy of homegrown communism within Latina/o communities, illuminates their 83 This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 84 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly grassroots strategies for applying the theories of Marxism-Leninism to their local conditions and communities, and evaluates the effects of state surveillance on their grassroots efforts. Key Words: August 29th Movement (ATM); Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); League of Revolutionary Struggle; communist activism, 1970s; Lati- na/o communists; policing and radicalism. “We had a meeting at a prospective member’s house in Orange County. For security reasons, we took his phone apart and put it in the freezer. He went, ‘What did you do that for?’ We didn’t know how to deal with the issues of security.”1 W hen Bill Gallegos of the August 29th Movement (ATM)—a Latina/o Marxist-Leninist organization that was active from 1974 to 1978—entered the home of a prospective member we will call Arturo Diaz sometime around 1974, he knew the risks of being ensnared by an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent or police informant. Though comical, putting the phone in the freezer was a small but telling gesture that spoke to Gallegos’s intimate familiarity with the pressures of state surveillance. Indeed, Gallegos had been involved in key organizations of the Chicana/o movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the Crusade for Justice, the Brown Berets, and La Raza Unida Party. All of these organizations were objects of state harassment and surveillance. Like the ATM, each maintained policies of secrecy during the global Cold War.2 Thus, by the time he helped form the Marxist-Leninist ATM in 1974, Gallegos knew all too well the devastating impact of state surveillance, not only on the lives of Chicana/o activists but also on the trajectory of Latina/o radical traditions. 1 Bill Gallegos, interview by author, March 2, 2018. For more on Gallegos’s involvement in the Chicana/o and New Communist movements see: Elly Leary and Anne Lewis, “Interview with Bill Gallegos,” Monthly Review 67, no. 5 (2015): 19. https://monthlyreview.org/2015/10/01/interview -with-bill-gallegos/ 2 Former Crusade for Justice member Ernesto Vigil and former leader of La Raza Unida Party José Angel Gutiérrez have both written detailed accounts of the surveillance histories of multiple Chicana/o movement organizations using FBI files. Ernesto B. Vigil, The Crusade for Justice Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); José Angel Gutiérrez, The Eagle Has Eyes: The FBI Surveillance of César Estrada Chávez of the United Farm Workers Union of America, 1965–1975 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019). This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 85 A predominantly Chicana/o organization established in May 1974, the August 29th Movement drew members from revolutionary collectives in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and New Mexico. Members of the ATM took inspiration from the activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Above all, ATM members sought radical change for their communities, and they envisioned the ATM as the potential vanguard organization for Chicana/ os in the United States. They united with university students, Latina/o communities, and workers as they drew upon a Marxist-Leninist van- guard ideology.3 They rigorously attempted to understand and apply the philosophies of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong to all minorities’ struggles of self-determination. ATM members like Gallegos felt they had a duty to organize the masses of oppressed people in the United States and help fight the twin oppressions they faced under capitalism as minorities and as working-class individuals. Indeed, the FBI had eyes on the ATM precisely because its members wanted to forge cross-racial, working-class solidarities and create a new, multiracial communist party. They sought to replace the Communist Party USA, which, after the 1950s, due to the purging of Communists in institutions such as labor unions, was a shell of its former self.4 The Chicana/o movement began in the mid-1960s as a broad social movement of interrelated organizations and activists that had a diverse range of agendas. Cultural nationalism was the dominant ideology and was a “positive force for developing nations and racialized minorities in the West. Its ideological power served to bring diverse groups together under the banner of independence from colonial exploitation, economic under- development, and institutional development.”5 Juan Gómez-Quiñones 3 The idea of a vanguard party has existed throughout twentieth-century global communist move- ments. Vanguardism proposed that certain individuals would emerge to lead the masses of workers and revolutionaries to provide leadership of liberation movements. A. James McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 4 I capitalize Communists and Communism when dealing with the institution of the Communist Party USA and in titles of formal organizations and movements. When dealing with those outside these institutions, I use lower case communists and communism as these organizations utilized similar ideologies as the CPUSA but operated outside the bounds of international Communist Parties such as those in the Soviet Union and China. I believe studies of the ideological system of communism need to begin diversifying the experiences of those outside of the CPUSA. 5 Mariscal also argues that histories of non-nationalist, rather internationalists, need to be further explored as the movement was ideologically diverse. George Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965–1975 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 44. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 86 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly argues that the Chicana/o movement stagnated from 1971 to 1974 because Marxists created factionalism and fragmentation. He states they had a lack of ideological clarity and consistency that deterred movement activ- ists away from the concept of chicanismo so vital from 1966 to 1977.6 Scholars of the Chicana/o movement and Chicana/o history have paid minimal attention to activists of the Left, which is problematic since it hides the ways these organizations shaped Mexican American and Chicana/o political identities. Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez has argued that the ATM and other leftist organizations were destructive and under- mined labor struggles in New Mexico.7 Juan Gómez-Quiñones and Irene Vazquez posit that the ATM was influential for raising the political con- sciousness of students and activists, but they also argue the organization was intrusive and counterproductive. They believe the organizations of the left were important because they were transitional for activists of the Chicana/o movement to enter the activism of the 1980s surround- ing immigration issues.8 Carlos Muñoz Jr. claims the ATM was the first distinctly Marxist-Leninist group separate from the white New Left, yet it still only receives a superficial treatment in Latina/o scholarship and studies of leftist movements despite being present at major historical moments of the movement.9 This article uses organizational sources and oral histories in tan- dem with documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to show how state surveillance influenced the security measures and policies of the ATM and its outgrowth, the multiracial League of Revolutionary Struggle. The league existed from 1978 to 1990 and was the product of the merger of Latina/o, Asian American, and African American Marxist-Leninist groups that all had long histories of interaction with various forms of policing. I show how the specter of surveillance hand- icapped these radical traditions, especially in their abilities to recruit 6 Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Mexican Students Por La Raza: The Chicano Student Movement in Southern California, 1967–1977 (Santa Bárbara, California: Editorial La Causa, 1978), 15. For more on the origins and development of these organizations and the Chicana/o movement see: Juan Gómez- Quiñones and Irene Vásquez, Making Aztlán: Ideology and Culture of the Chicana and Chicano Move- ment, 1966–1977 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014). 7 Elizabeth Martinez, “A View from New Mexico: Recollections of the Movimiento Left,” Monthly Review 54, no. 3 (July 2002). https://monthlyreview.org/2002/07/01/a-view-from-new-mexico/ 8 Gómez-Quiñones and Vásquez, Making Aztlán, 226. 9 Carlos Jr. Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (New York: Verso Press, 1989), 212. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 87 potential members, even after the 1975 Church Committee hearings into alleged abuses of power by the FBI and other policing agencies. Yet despite these handicaps, the ATM forged ahead and successfully founded what the FBI feared most: a multiracial Marxist-Leninist coalition.10 Still, the slow poison of surveillance was one reason the ATM’s outgrowth—the League of Revolutionary Struggle—fell apart in 1990. Arturo Diaz, a pseudonym for the prospective ATM member whose phone was destroyed, felt Gallegos’s and other ATM members’ tactics were paranoid and excessive. Because of this, he did not join the orga- nization. Diaz believed that the ATM brought more attention onto itself because, he reasoned, if you were police, “who do you look for? You look for the person acting suspicious.”11 While Diaz had valid points considering the ATM’s motives for being secretive, FBI special agents in charge, field agents, and directors of the bureau did keep tabs on the ATM, the Chicana/o movement, and the New Communist movement.12 The perceived threat was real, not exaggerated as Diaz alludes. This exchange between Gallegos and Diaz provides a window into how the fear of policing influenced the growth and containment of social movements beyond the 1975–1976 Church Committee hearings created by Congress to investigate FBI abuses of power. In studying the history of the ATM through the lens of surveillance, we are able not only to 10 Congress approved the committee in January 1975 to investigate alleged abuses of power by the FBI and other policing agencies. The committee’s investigations exposed the CIA and FBI’s improper tactics and illegal activities, many of which infringed upon the rights of U.S. citizens. The investigations revealed improper bureau activities such as attempting to coerce Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide by blackmailing him. The committee’s findings led President Gerald Ford to adopt new internal guidelines for the FBI’s activities. In response, the bureau began closing investigations into domestic issues, going from 21,400 open investigations in July 1973 to 4,868 by March 1976. Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence and Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962–1974 (London: Repeater Books, 2018), 190; Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 500. 11 Pseudonyms have been created for some interviewees due to fears of red baiting. A major obstacle to writing about recent communist movements is that these fears still exist in present-day society around anti-communism. Arturo Diaz, interview by author, February 28, 2018. 12 The New Communist movement emerged out of the New Left and student groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society. Activists in new organizations sought to use the writings from Latin American, Asian, and African liberation movements from around 1968–1990. They also used the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao as alternative ideologies in response to the limitations of 1960s activism. Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London and Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2002), 3. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 88 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly see a genealogy of radicalism formed in Latina/o communities but also gauge the simultaneous development of the FBI’s tactics against commu- nists after 1975. The history of the ATM suggests that the long history of surveillance influenced the policies and psyche of activists in the 1980s comparable to a slow poison. In other words, the threat of surveillance and infiltration was just as powerful as the actual disruptions and neu- tralizations that the FBI commonly employed and served as other weap- ons in the Hoover and post-Hoover FBI war against social movements. In telling this history, I build upon historian David Montejano’s argu- ment that policing helped contain and disrupt not only the Chicana/o movement but also the New Communist movement of the 1960s and 1980s. As Montejano claims, we cannot say for certain how much state police agencies’ counterinsurgency tactics contributed to the splintering and failures of the Chicana/o movement. However, there is no question that overt and covert police activities contributed to internal tensions and divisions within social movements.13 Activists were arrested or threatened with deportations while organizations were disrupted from within. Of course, these tactics were not new in the 1960s but had been perfected in previous decades. Like any type of primary source, FBI documents contain certain biases and limitations, as they reflect the racial, gender, and political biases of the authorities. Yet when dealing with social movement his- tory, especially relating to communists, police and FBI records fill gaps in organizational histories. These gaps, of course, were themselves products of state surveillance, as activists omitted names and locations from documents to evade red baiting. FBI sources also tell us something about the state via its agents and efforts to protect the status quo. Taken by themselves, however, FBI sources portray a one-sided perspective to movements and the people in them. Oral histories, print sources, and other ephemera constitute cru- cial counterweights to FBI files and police reports; taken together, these 13 Montejano explores how federal and state agents focused not only on radicals but also on others he calls “gradualists” from organizations such as La Raza Unida Party and the Brown Berets. David Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 89 sources create what Kelly Lytle Hernández calls a rebel archive.14 A rebel archive brings to light what may be missing from traditional sources. As indicated above, sources left behind by ATM members did not contain any names due to fear of political persecution and surveillance. This makes telling the history of the ATM and Latina/o communist activism exceptionally difficult. At the same time, FBI documents indicate where ATM pamphlets and newspapers were sold and where organizing events were held, thus giving insight into the scope of organizations’ ideas and practice. Lastly, FBI sources provide insight into organization structure, locations, and more. These details are crucial, especially because oral history interviewees are selective as to what they let an interviewer know due to fears of red baiting. The limitations of memory and lack of details also play a role. Policing agents and agencies often record social movements better than activists themselves and historians can. The first section of this essay begins by tracing the history of the policing of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as well as communist movements in the United States during the long twentieth century. Trac- ing this history situates the ATM and activists such as Gallegos within two genealogies: one of policing and one of radicalism. Moreover, I show how these genealogies intersected to place Mexican and Mexi- can American activists at the dangerous nexus of anti-foreignness and anti-communism. Next, I chronicle the history of the ATM’s founding before considering why FBI agents zeroed in on the organization. Despite the group having a membership that fluctuated between 100 and 200 members, the bureau dedicated a vast number of resources to its sur- veillance efforts. Size clearly did not matter to the FBI, which perceived the ATM as un-American and therefore a threat to the internal security of the nation. In the final section, I turn to the multiracial League of Revolutionary Struggle, which emerged from the ATM. The league’s extensive security measures reveal how Asian American and African American Marxist-Leninists maintained clandestine approaches like those of the ATM. The ironic outcome of state harassment was that the organizations shared histories of engagement with the FBI while 14 Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 90 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly organizing during the Cold War. Each group had its own unique, long history of radicalism and repression, including their similar encoun- ters with state surveillance and their shift from cultural nationalism to Marxism-Leninism. Their respective shifts from cultural nationalists first rooted in their communities to later becoming internationalists, is why I call them homegrown communists.15 Each group’s commitments steadfastly prioritized the needs and interests of the Latina/o, Asian American, and African American communities. From the Brown Scare to COINTELPRO Anti-communism defines much of twentieth-century U.S. history, and progressive activists have long felt the constraints set by anti-communist hysteria. For activists of color, though, anti-communism historically has been linked to forms of racial oppression and anti-foreignism. Anti-communism has never been race neutral but rather is tied to ideas of racial capitalism. Contextualizing the political atmosphere in which the August 29th Movement developed requires a closer examination of local police departments’ and national agencies’ efforts to contain Mex- ican American and Chicana/o activists. Latina/o activists’ encounters with McCarthyism and policing in the mid-twentieth century shaped their collective consciousness as anti-imperialists and internationalists. Anti-foreignness and anti-communism have been mutually consti- tuting forces in the lives of all people of color in the U.S., and Mexi- can Americans have felt the effects of these forces intensely.16 The U.S. State eyed Mexican-descended activists with contempt and suspicion 15 Scholars of Black and African American communists have similarly detailed how activists utilized both communism the idea and organized communist parties such as the CPUSA domestically and internationally to seek change to their objective local conditions. For more on this scholarship see: Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 16 For more on this framing see: Charisse Burden-Stelly, “W.E.B. Du Bois in the Tradition of Radical Blackness: Radicalism, Repression, and Mutual Comradeship, 1930–1960,” Socialism and Democracy 32, no. 3 (2018): 181–206; Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Constructing Deportable Subjectivity: Antifor- eignness, Antiradicalism, and Antiblackness during the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling,” Souls 19, no. 3 (2017): 342–58. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 91 following mass immigration to the United States during the Mexican Revolution. Over 250,000 migrants entered the country in the 1900–1920 period.17 This large influx gave rise to the Brown Scare from 1913 to 1918. Inflamed by an economic depression and fed by extremist labor movements, U.S. citizens began espousing racial hatred and nativism. This led to the onset of a Brown Scare that included immigration quota laws based on race and nationality.18 This also meant a rise of political repression. As Ricardo Romo writes, intense nativism even led U.S. citi- zens to advocate the purging of “unwanted aliens” and cultural elements from foreign countries such as Mexico.19 Brown Scare hysteria matched the political repression aimed at com- munists and other radicals in Los Angeles and beyond.20 Municipal police departments, many of which were founded in the mid-nineteenth century to curb the working-classes, controlled labor unions and other organizations through infiltration and various forms of repression. In Los Angeles, LAPD officers broke up meetings, dispersed picket lines, and intimidated organized labor and other leftist groups in the city.21 LAPD officers also dealt with the influx of Mexican refugees and concomitant surge in Mexican radicalism.22 In particular, officers feared Mexican rad- icals such as brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón. The brothers led an anarcho-syndicalist group named El Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), which hoped to launch an offensive against Mexican President Porfirio Díaz from Los Angeles.23 Officers feared that the Magonistas’ revolutionary rhetoric would spill over into the U.S. Such fears were not entirely unfounded, as PLM members often allied with the International 17 Gilbert G. Gonzalez and Raul A. Fernandez, A Century of Chicano History: Empire, Nations and Migration (London: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 44. 18 On the Brown Scare see: Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Edward J. Escobar, “The Dialectics of Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano Movement, 1968–1971,” The Journal of American History (Bloomington, Ind.) 79, no. 4 (1993): 1483–1514; Hernandez, City of Inmates. 19 Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio, 89. 20 Ibid., 90; Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 11. 21 Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 13. 22 Romo, East Los Angeles, 92. 23 Justin Akers Chacón, Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican American Working Class (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018). This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 92 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies. Given this reality, police held Mexican workers in a “subordinated status” by deporting Mexican work- ers and policing their labor strikes. Such actions further “engendered hostility between the Mexican community and the LAPD.”24 In other words, race, citizenship, and working-class status combined to situate Mexican-descended activists under the watchful eyes of the LAPD. Nationally, the U.S. government created the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate the activities of labor unions, leftists, and migrants from other parts of the world. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte created the bureau in 1908 to look for anarchists, Bolshe- viks, Socialists, and other radicals including communists.25 Once again, state officials linked anti-foreignism with state surveillance, as officials focused their efforts on both immigrants and citizens who were influ- enced by the Russian Revolution. In 1919, J. Edgar Hoover began using the bureau to deport those who were deemed subversive or engaging in espionage against the United States.26 Hoover’s primary targets during what became known as the First Red Scare was the Communist Party USA and later included the Socialist Workers Party.27 The nexus of anti-communism and anti-foreignism became even more entrenched following World War II with the rise of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Historian Ellen Schrecker argues that many McCarthyisms existed in the late 1940s and 1950s. The first is commonly linked to Senator Joseph McCarthy and his personal crusade against communism. However, McCarthyism got its power from the “willingness of the men... who ran the nation’s main public and private institutions to condone serious violations of civil liberties” to eradicate “what they believed was the far more serious danger of Com- munism.”28 The FBI was the machinery driving postwar McCarthyism, 24 Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 13. 25 Leonard and Gallagher, A Threat of the First Magnitude, 15. 26 For more on the connections between radical ideologies and deportations throughout the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries, see Julia Rose Kraut, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020); Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 27 Leonard and Gallagher, A Threat of the First Magnitude, 15. 28 Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Com- pany, 1998), xi. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 93 “shaping loyalty programs, criminal prosecutions, and undercover oper- ations” and pushing the issue of communism to the center of American politics.29 As Schrecker notes, thousands of people lost their jobs, went to prison, or were punished in other ways because of McCarthyism.30 Black Studies scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly shows how this regime of anti-communist repression forcefully collided with anti-foreignism following the passage of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (1938), the Smith Act (1940), and the Walter-McCarran Act (1952), creating an atmo- sphere of uncertainty for radicals of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. This legislation, Burden-Stelly posits, gave rise to a “McCarthyist struc- ture of feeling” that used deportation, incarceration, and exile to target Black radicals, regardless of their citizenship status. Black activists such as Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, Cyril Briggs, and C. L. R. James were targeted precisely for being Black, foreign, and/or for promoting inter- nationalist ideals.31 Just as the U.S. government incarcerated and deported Black rad- icals, it targeted Latina/o activists. When the histories of Black and Latina/o radicals are viewed in a single frame, it becomes clear that the state regime and its legal architecture fomented an attack that combined anti-communism with anti-foreignism and anti-radicalism. Consider the case of Guatemalan-born labor organizer and civil rights activist Luisa Moreno. Born in 1907, Moreno moved to Mexico City as a teen before eventually relocating to New York City in 1928. Moreno joined the Communist Party while in New York for a brief period and quickly rose to prominence as a transcontinental labor organizer with stops in New York, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, and California.32 Moreno eventually co-founded El Congreso de los Pueblos de Habla Española (the National Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples) in 1939. Bert Corona, a one-time member of El Congreso and later a major leader in El Centro 29 Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, 203. 30 Ibid. 31 Burden-Stelly, “Constructing Deportable Subjectivity.” 32 Sarah McNamara, “Borderland Unionism: Latina Activism in Ybor City and Tampa, Florida, 1935–1937,” Journal of American Ethnic History 38, no. 4 (2019): 10–32; Vicki L. Ruiz, “Una Mujer Sin Fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 1 (2004): 1–20; Jeffrey M. Garcilazo, “McCarthyism, Mexican Americans, and the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of the Foreign-Born, 1950–1954,” Western Historical Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2001): 273–95. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 94 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly de Acción Social Autónomo (Center for Autonomous Social Action) of the Chicana/o movement, recalls that Moreno wanted to create a group to fight “a variety of issues affecting the Spanish-speaking: police repression, racial discrimination, increased educational opportunities, better jobs, barrio improvements, lower rent.”33 Moreno and El Congreso worked with labor unions to secure better conditions for workers while also seeking protection for foreign-born community members.34 Not surprisingly, Moreno and El Congreso became victims of McCa- rthyist red baiting as state officials deemed their actions un-American.35 In September 1948, California state officials summoned Moreno to tes- tify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in San Diego. As historian Jeffrey Garcilazo notes, Moreno invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer any questions. HUAC officials determined Moreno should be deported for being a “dangerous alien that supposedly advocated the overthrow of the government by force or violence.”36 In November 1950, Moreno requested to voluntarily leave the U.S. and soon departed for Mexico.37 Moreno’s forced self-deportation points to how the McCarthyist structure of feeling, to borrow Charisse Burden-Stelly’s phrasing, extended beyond Black leftists to include Mex- ican Americans and the Latina/o Left. Arguably, Moreno constituted what Carol Boyce Davies has termed a “deportable subject,” not only because of her citizenship status and race but because her activism chal- lenged the very “nature of United States policies and practices.”38 Latina/o activists besides Moreno also were caught in the web of 33 Mario T. García, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 108. 34 Moreno and El Congreso helped provide legal defense aid to the zoot suit teens on trial known as the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. See: Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 35 George Sánchez writes, “There is little doubt that El Congreso was part of a Communist ‘Popular Front’ strategy to encourage ethnic minorities in the United States to join them in a fight against racial and class oppression.” Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 245. 36 Garcilazo, “McCarthyism, Mexican Americans, and the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of the Foreign-Born, 1950–1954,” 278. 37 Ibid., 279. 38 Carole Boyce Davies, “Deportable Subjects: U.S. Immigration Laws and the Criminalizing of Communism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 4 (2001): 949–66, 960. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 95 anti-communist legislation.39 Other activists with more tenable ties to the CPUSA were similarly deported, including Rodrigo Lozoya, a Chicago-based trade unionist. Like Moreno, Lozoya was deported under the McCarran-Walter Act (Immigration and Nationality Act) of 1952 for being foreign and radical. Born in Mexico, Lozoya was classified as a security threat by the Immigration and Naturalization Service while abroad. This classification prevented him from returning home to Chi- cago, according to historian Adam Goodman.40 The story of CPUSA member and Latino labor organizer Ralph Cuarón further indicates how the FBI tracked Latina/o communists’ movements. As historian Enrique Buelna shows, Cuarón was among a bridge generation of leftist activists who provided leadership and guidance to the rising Chicana/o movement generation. Active since 1930, Cuarón lent his experience to his daughter Margarita (Mita), a key leader of the Chicano blowouts of the late 1960s.41 The FBI tracked the elder Cuarón and his wife, Sylvia, for over two decades, amassing thousands of pages of surveillance files for their “seemingly danger- ous and subversive activities.”42 The examples of Moreno, Lozoya, and Cuarón indicate how the McCarthyist regime targeted Latina/o—more specifically Mexican and Chicana/o—communists and fellow travelers nationwide. Surveillance of these communities happened simultaneously 39 For more on how other Mexican American and Chicana/o communists and Marxist-Leninists faced ramifications from policing agencies see: Zaragosa Vargas, “Tejana Radical: Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio Labor Movement during the Great Depression,” Pacific Historical Review 66, no. 4 (1997): 553–80; Gabriela Gonzalez, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respect- ability, and Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Marisela R. Chavez, “ ‘We lived and breathed and worked the movement’: The Contradictions and Rewards of Chicana/Mexicana Activism in el Centro de Acción Social Autónomo-Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA- HGT), Los Angeles, 1975–1978,” in Vicki L. Ruiz, ed., Las Obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2000), 83–106; Alan Eladio Gómez, The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico: Chicana/o Radicalism, Solidarity Politics, and Latin American Social Movements (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 40 Adam Goodman, “Barring the Gates: A History of Political Exclusion and Family Separation in Cold War America,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 18, no. 1 (2021): 54–66. 41 The Chicano high school blowouts occurred in the late 1960s, when thousands of East Los Angeles high school students walked out of school demanding improvements to their education. Their demands included different curricula, more teachers and counselors of Latina/o descent, and other structural changes. For more on the Cuarons and the blowouts see: Enrique M. Buelna, Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019); Mario T. García and Sal Castro, Blowout!: Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 42 Buelna, Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice, xiii. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 96 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly at the national, state, and local levels, with similar tactics of deporta- tion and restriction being deployed against Latina/os affiliated with, or consorting among, communists and internationalists. State surveillance of Latina/o communities only intensified in the 1960s and 1970s, as ethnic and race-based movements proliferated, espe- cially among Chicana/os. As Edward Escobar reminds us, if political protest defined the late 1960s and 1970s, so too did political repression. “Law enforcement agencies, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to municipal police departments attempted to limit, undermine, and even destroy the various protest movements,” Escobar writes.43 These forces used tactics such as infiltration and disruption while gathering intelligence on the ideologies and activities of various groups. As with the previous generation, activists in the 1960s faced government repres- sion depending on their citizenship status and ideological orientation. Local police departments and the FBI labeled some Chicana/o move- ment organizations and individuals in the 1960s and 1970s as subversives and pawns of the Communist Party to discredit organizations within their own communities.44 Such descriptions further shaped the percep- tion of communism and communists being somehow alien and a foreign threat instead of organic and grassroots. In this regard, continuities existed between the forms of policing confronting Mexican and Mex- ican Americans in the early twentieth century and those confronting activists in the Chicana/o movement. Just as organizations shifted their ideological and practical organiz- ing foci, local police and the FBI adapted new tactics of surveillance. In addition to using confidential informants, Hoover and bureau agents took down license plate numbers of vehicles parked outside political meetings; rifled through people’s trash; intercepted mail; and broke into homes and offices to plant illegal microphones and wiretaps—all in the name of national security.45 Such tactics were intended to subvert and destroy organizations in and beyond the Chicana/o movement. 43 Escobar, “The Dialectics of Repression,” 1487. 44 Ernesto Chávez, Mi Raza Primero: Nationalism Identity and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Escobar, “The Dialectics of Repression;” Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers; Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 45 Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 225. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 97 The presence of police informers took its toll on Chicana/o movement organizations, whether leftist or reformist oriented.46 The threat of state surveillance not only left many Chicana/o communities distrustful of leftist politics but also created uncertainty within Chicana/o organiza- tions about who might possibly be police informants. Given this reality, anti-communism persisted among many of the movement’s key leaders such as José Angel Gutiérrez of La Raza Unida Party and David Sanchez of the Brown Berets, who attempted to purge or censor members leaning toward communism or Marxism.47 Occurring alongside the Chicana/o movement was the New Com- munist movement that existed from the late 1960s until 1990. Organiza- tions of the New Communist movement, the ATM included, followed a Third World Marxist orientation that combined elements of Stalinism, Maoism, and Trotskyism. As writer Max Elbaum notes, activists of the New Communist movement embraced Third World Marxism because it “pointed a way toward building a multiracial movement out of a badly segregated US left.”48 In other words, Third World Marxism provided an ideological framework that broke with the Old Left and Eurocentric models of social change. Activists shifted away from European centers and looked toward leaders and movements in Africa, Latin America, and Asia for inspiration. In the process, they centered anti-racism and anti-imperialism in Marxist-Leninist thought. Special agents in the FBI attempted to disrupt and neutralize the activism of organizations that embraced Third World Marxism, includ- ing groups in the Chicana/o and the New Communist movements. In 1956 J. Edgar Hoover and the bureau created the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to discredit social movements across the politi- cal spectrum.49 Some sections of COINTELPRO focused on what the FBI 46 Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers. 47 Cruz Olmeda Becerra, interview by Gerald Rosen, December 23, 1978, Chicano Students in Los Angeles [Oral History Project 226] Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton; Chávez, Mi Raza Primero, 51. 48 Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 3. 49 Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988); Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1990); William J. Maxwell, F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 98 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly called Black extremists, the Socialist Workers Party, the New Left, and the Ku Klux Klan.50 Students on college campuses involved in orga- nizations such as the Students for Democratic Society, Black leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Black Power organizations such as the Black Panther Party, and the Communist Party USA were some of the bureau’s favorite targets for surveillance and infiltration. While much of the American public viewed the FBI as a protective force, the bureau effectively “usurped citizens’ liberties, treated Black citizens as if they were a danger to society, and used deception, disinformation, and vio- lence to harass, damage, and—most important—silence people whose political opinions the director opposed.”51 Scholars only recently have begun to unravel how the FBI infiltrated New Communist organizations.52 Most controversially, former Black Panther Party ally Richard Aoki has been scrutinized by scholars using FBI documents.53 Aoki first caught the attention of the FBI in 1957 and by the 1960s was allegedly reporting on the Black Panther Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Berkeley student strike, and other Asian American revolutionary organizations and their affiliates such as I Wor Kuen (IWK), which later went on to merge with ATM. Aoki also reported on the pro-Maoist group the Revolutionary Union (RU). A close affili- ate of the ATM, the RU faced infiltration for their Marxist and Maoist ideals.54 Aoki’s story stresses the ways FBI infiltrators spied on multiple Third World Marxist organizations simultaneously. For instance, a sec- ond infiltrator reported not only on the RU but also the Black Workers Congress, the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, IWK, the Red Guards, and the ATM.55 50 Leonard and Gallagher, A Threat of the First Magnitude, 18. 51 Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (New York: Knopf, 2014), 7. 52 Leonard and Gallagher, A Threat of the First Magnitude; Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher, Heavy Radicals—The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists: The Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party, 1968–1980 (Alresford: Zero Books, 2014). 53 Over 1,500 documents relating to the FBI’s surveillance of the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 1970s are available for examination. Some writers have used these to explore Aoki’s reporting and have been critiqued for lacking nuance. For more on these differing perspectives see: Leonard and Gallagher, A Threat of the First Magnitude, Chapter 3; Diane Carol Fujino, Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives. 54 Bob Avakian, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist: A Memoir by Bob Avakian (Chicago: Insight Press, 2006). 55 Leonard and Gallagher, A Threat of the First Magnitude, Chapters 6 and 8. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 99 This was the backdrop against which the bureau began its investiga- tions into the August 29th Movement. As a Latina/o organization, the ATM worked closely with immigrants and citizens. Yet as a Third World Marxist organization committed to internationalist solidarities, the ATM stood firmly within the New Communist movement and even merged with some of the above organizations. Standing at the confluence of the Chicana/o and New Communist movements, ATM activists faced police surveillance head-on. As we will see, surveillance was so pervasive that it ultimately shaped the broader trajectory of the organization and the collective consciousness of its members. The Formation of the August 29th Movement The August 29th Movement was founded in May 1974 when four Chi- cana/o Marxist collectives formally merged. The collectives—based in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, and Albuquerque—met in Los Angeles for a Unity Congress. There, they voted to create a new national organization rooted in the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, and they committed themselves to fomenting an anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist revolution.56 Shortly after the congress concluded, the ATM released its founding platform, Unity Statement, which read, “We feel that the central and most urgent task of Marxist-Leninists is the formation of a multinational Communist Party.” This party, they wrote, would grow to be an “instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”57 Oral histories with many of the ATM’s founding members indicate that several had been active in the Chicana/o movement and were present at key events during the 1960s and 1970s. Several future members emerged from campus activism at San Francisco State College, including Eva Martinez, who became a student shortly after the 1968 student pro- tests for an Ethnic Studies department. Other ATM members, most nota- bly Theresa Montaño, emerged from student groups such as the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) at California State University, Los 56 “AUGUST TWENTYNINTH MOVEMENT,” JULY 20, 1976, 12, box 1, folder 27, Ernesto Chavez Collection of Chicano Movement FBI Records 1968–2011, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California, Los Angeles. Hereafter referred to as Chavez collection, UCLA CSRC. 57 The August 29th Movement, Unity Statement, 1974, 10, Eric Mann and Lian Hurst Mann Papers, 1967–2007. MS 657, Series 3 box 20, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 100 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly Angeles.58 Roberto Flores, who served on the central committees of the ATM and later the league, was present at the University of California Los Angeles in the 1960s. Flores helped cofound UMAS, El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (The Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán, MEChA), and the Oxnard Brown Berets.59 Cruz Olmeda Bec- erra also got his start in Chicana/o movement organizations. Becerra was a founding member of the Brown Berets in East Los Angeles. His experiences within the cultural nationalist organization eventually led him to become the first chairman of the August 29th Movement.60 He split from the Berets after moving toward Marxism. Meanwhile, Joe Navarro and others cut their teeth in an organization known as Los Siete de La Raza. Los Siete formed in San Francisco in May 1969 to provide “legal counsel for seven Latin youths known as ‘Los Siete,’ charged with the murder of a policeman.”61 The organization mobi- lized in San Francisco’s Mission District on behalf of the seven young men, who were predominantly Central American. The organization garnered publicity by working with liberals, the Black Panther Party, and other leftist radicals. It soon transformed into a full-blown community group dedicated to the political, economic, and cultural empowerment of Latina/os. Most important, members of Los Siete effectively tied struggles against police repression to struggles against U.S. imperialism and capital- ism.62 Recognizing these links, Navarro and a few members of Los Siete formed a collective dedicated to Marxist-Leninist study and application. 58 Theresa Montaño, interview by author, August 22, 2018; Eva Martinez, interview by author, March 30, 2018. 59 For more on Flores and his wide-ranging activism in Oxnard, California see: Frank P. Barajas, Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Transgenerational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County, California, 1945–1975 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021). 60 Becerra famously was indicted as one of the “Eastside 13” defendants arrested in Los Angeles in 1968 for helping high school students during the blowouts. He is regarded as a key leader and founder of the organization. Cruz Olmeda Becerra, interview by Gerald Rosen; Chávez, “¡Mi Raza Primero!,” 50; Ian F. Haney Lopez, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 184–86. 61 Report from special agent, San Francisco Branch of Federal Bureau of Investigation, “AUGUST TWENTYNINTHMOVEMENT [sic]” July 20, 1976, index, pg. 31, Chavez Collection, CSRC UCLA. 62 Central Americans also made up the organization, including at least one Salvadoran who became a key leader in the ATM and the league. Jason M. Ferreira, “With the Soul of a Human Rainbow: Los Siete, the Black Panthers, and Third Worldism in San Francisco” in Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968–1978, Chris Carlsson and Lisa Ruth Elliot, eds. (San Francisco: City Lights Foundation Books, 2011), 30–47. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 101 Collectives like this formed the base of the ATM. Groups of activ- ists linked to Los Siete, La Raza Unida Party, the Crusade for Justice, and the Brown Berets simultaneously discerned that Latina/os and the working-class peoples needed an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist ideology to create societal change. Marxist-Leninist rev- olutionary thought, they soon realized, was the ideological tool they needed to effect change. As noted above, college students comprised a large portion of the collectives. Still, most members were workers in factories and plants; many of them hailed from poor or working-class backgrounds with perhaps a high school education. These workers became a crucial component of the ATM’s member- ship after the group invested time and resources into labor unions. The basis for the ATM’s work in unions was to win “advanced workers over to the side of communism,” recruit them into their organization, and build communist nuclei within workplace settings. Not only would this grow the ATM’s numbers; it would also stop workers from joining right-leaning trade unions.63 As such, the ATM leveraged unions as a “training ground of the proletariat, [an] area where [workers could] learn organized methods of struggle in the fight against the bourgeoisie.”64 Workers, of course, were drawn to ATM-led unions because of their activ- ism, which advocated for better representation of minorities and women, improved working conditions, and better wages.65 If much of the ATM’s membership comprised lower strata workers, between one-half to one-third were Vietnam War veterans.66 The ATM’s name also reflected its members’ veteran status in the Chicana/o move- ment. In movimiento history, August 29, 1970, is seared in the minds of Chicana/o movement activists as the date of the 1970 Chicano Mor- atorium against the Vietnam War. More than 30,000 people gathered at the East Los Angeles demonstration, making it the largest antiwar protest by any single ethnic group. The demonstration ended in police brutality and the assassination of Los Angeles Times writer Ruben Sala- zar. Many future ATM members attended the anti-imperialist march or 63 The August 29th Movement, “Unity Statement,” 21. 64 Ibid., 18. 65 Ibid., 31. 66 Cruz Olmeda Becerra, interview by author, June 16, 2017. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 102 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly took inspiration from it, spurring what Edward Escobar identifies as a dialectical relationship between policing and social activism.67 At the very least, the name August 29th Movement indicates the organization’s close ties to the Chicana/o movement despite having Central American, African American, and white (including Jewish) members. Finally, the ATM recruited first-generation immigrants whose parents had moved to the U.S. This immigrant base influenced the ATM’s orga- nizing approach, which often focused on helping immigrants from Latin America, who labored under some of the most exploitative conditions. The ATM’s immigrant-rights work placed the organization within a long tradition of Latina/o activism aimed at confronting the intersecting forces of anti-foreignism and anti-communism. Working with immi- grants and advocating Marxist-Leninist thought—long deemed a foreign ideology—raised red flags among FBI and other government officials. As historian Ellen Schrecker writes, federal officials saw the American Communist Party, and communism more broadly, as the secretive arm of a foreign enemy whose members infiltrated the government and engaged in sabotage and espionage.68 As we have seen, Latina/o citizens have been deemed un-American and foreign since the Brown Scare simply because of their race. Embracing Marxist-Leninist thought moved them even further outside the bounds of acceptable citizenship. ATM members enlisted trade union workers, students, and commu- nity members by recruiting them into study groups focused on reading and applying the Marxist canon.69 Classes examined topics such as political economy, the national question, and the woman question.70 The national question revolved around Marxist writings—particularly that of Lenin and Stalin—that offered the political language for the concept of self-determination, empowering one to define his or her own liberation struggles and post-liberation goals. Both Lenin and Stalin said that a nation of people had the right of self-determination, to determine their own structures and governance. The ATM read this literature to 67 Notably, LAPD agents attempted to blame the eruption of violence on outside communist influ- ence in order to discredit the anti-war protests. Oropeza, ¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No!, 176; Escobar, “The Dialectics of Repression,” 1485. 68 Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, x–xv. 69 “AUGUST TWENTYNINTHMOVEMENT,” JULY 20, 1976, 11. Chavez Collection, UCLA CSRC. 70 Bill Gallegos, interview by author, March 2, 2018. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 103 determine if Chicana/os had a right to identify as a nation within the U.S. nation. Literature in the study groups appeared in both English and Spanish, so everyone could complete the readings.71 Discussion leaders sent out reading lists before meetings along with materials. Most of the materials came from the “ton of Marxist-based bookstores throughout California,” and whatever they could not get in Spanish, they would obtain from Mexico. ATM members would then put the materials on tape, so that “Mexicanos would listen to it and then have a discussion.”72 Bill Gallegos continues, “Folks without a great education came prepared, and they would bring questions.” Recalling the first time he read Lenin’s What Is to Be Done, Gallegos said, “Fuck! I am never going to be a Marxist. I said I don’t know what the hell they are talking about.” This, however, only further convinced him of the importance of struggling collectively to break down complex theories.73 Members such as Gallegos utilized books by Stalin including Foun- dations of Leninism and Marxism and the National Question to study if Chi- cana/os were an oppressed nation within the U.S. nation state.74 They used Stalin’s writings with Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Cap- italism, to write their polemic on the Chicano national question. They joined a long Mexican American and Chicana/o intellectual tradition seeking to answer the national question related to Mexican descendants in the Southwest.75 For example, CPUSA member Emma Tenayuca in 1939 wrote: “The Mexican Question in the Southwest” with her husband, 71 Joe Navarro, interview by author, June 3, 2017. 72 Bill Gallegos, interview by author, March 2, 2018. 73 Ibid. 74 Specifically, they utilized Stalin’s writings on the definition of a nation. He claimed a nation is a “historically constituted, stable community of people, formed based on a common language, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” In other words, Stalin believed commonalities in language, culture, economy, territory, and national character determined these possibilities. These five characteristics could decide if a national or national minority group could claim self-determination and nationhood as argued in Marxism and the National Question. The excerpt of these passages from Stalin are found on the inside cover page of Fan the Flames. The August 29th Movement, Fan the Flames: A Revolutionary Position on the Chicano National Question, Radicalism Collection, Special Collections, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. 75 For more examples on how other organizations answered the Chicano national question see: Yolanda Alaniz and Megan Cornish, Viva La Raza: A History of Chicano Identity and Resistance (Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2008), 47–65. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 104 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly Homer Brooks.76 The ATM created a commission to conduct research and published their findings around 1976 in a pamphlet titled Fan the Flames: A Revolutionary Position on the Chicano National Question. According to Joe Navarro, the production of the document was “truly a collective process” that was the result of “everybody reading everything they could, debating, and arguing.”77 A few former members acknowledge that not everybody agreed upon the final product, but most did. Fan the Flames asked what a new Chicano nation’s borders could be, thus reimagining how borders are socially constructed.78 The writing of the document itself was a radical act as the organic intellectuals and amateur historians weaponized history to fit their political theories at a time when the field of Chicana/o history was in its infancy within the ivory tower. When reflecting on this period in the ATM’s intellectual trajectory, former Brown Beret and ATM chairman Cruz Olmeda Becerra felt two views of the national question exist in the document. One argument was that Chicanos met Stalin’s five-point criteria, and the other was a Leninist view of imperialism.79 Bill Gallegos recalls that James “Jimmy” Franco, a leader in the Labor Committee of La Raza Unida Party with Becerra, was one of the leading writers of Fan the Flames and another Chicano cadre. Franco and Becerra did a lot of the speaking on the national question at forums in Albuquerque, Chicago, and Denver by 76 Tenayuca famously was a key leader in San Antonio’s labor struggles, including the 1938 Pecan Sheller’s Strike, which ultimately got her blacklisted. Tenayuca faced similar repression as the ATM did over forty years later. Tenayuca and Brooks were the State Secretary and State Chairman of the Communist Party in Texas when they published their piece in the March 1939 issue of The Communist to inform CPUSA members about the plight of Mexicans in the Southwest after 1848. They decided that Mexican people in the Southwest did not constitute a nation; ATM disagreed. Emma Tenayuca and Homer Brooks, “The Mexican Question in the Southwest,” in The Commu- nist 18, no. 3 (March 1939); Gómez, The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico, 35–36; Vargas, “Tejana Radical,” 575–79. 77 Joe Navarro, interview by Eddie Bonilla, August 14, 2017. 78 The seventy-page document sold for $2.50. Its cover contained a drawing by an artist depicting a Chicano leader on horseback with a gun representing armed struggle on a background of a map of the Southwest states. 79 The ATM broke down their discussion of the national question via Stalin’s five points of nation- hood. In segments, they analyzed the boundaries of the Chicano nation and what it meant for them to be a historically constituted community of people concerning the rise of capitalism and imperialism. Other sections on the language of the Chicano people and the importance of the Chicano national movement followed. By juxtaposing the writings of Stalin and Lenin quoted throughout the document with sources from before and during the Chicana/o movement, ATM members sought to merge the two movements via the national question. Their rivals would argue this was not possible and was either too nationalistic or class-oriented with insufficient nationalism. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Members of the August 29th Movement collaborated on a statement on the Chicano national movement and its relevance to Mexican descendants in the Southwest in a pamphlet with a red cover titled “Fan the Flames: A Revolutionary Position on the Chicano National Question,” ca. 1976. Courtesy Marxists Internet Archive. 105 This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 106 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly traveling to the locations to speak and engage with audiences. FBI agents took note of these same meetings in their reports. Members recruited prospective newcomers from settings like picket lines and college campuses and from their ideas around the national question. For example, former member Theresa Montaño joined an ATM study group after transferring to California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) in the mid-1970s. The experience of living in South Central Los Angeles first drew Montaño to Marxist thought and action. She remembers three Marxist groups being most prominent at CSULA: the Communist League, El Centro de Acción Social Autónomo, and the ATM. She recalls “not being at a loss” for someone trying to recruit students into an organization. She started going to ATM events and even dating someone in the group before joining. The ATM’s discussion of the national question and their approach to the woman question caught her attention most. Unlike many organizations of the New Com- munist movement, the ATM eventually promoted women to positions of leadership. American Studies scholar Laura Pulido claims the ATM was one of the most conscious organizations when it came to center- ing women in the revolution.80 Finally, the ATM was more grounded in activism, Montaño remembers, while the other groups were more the- oretical. ATM allowed her to remain a Chicana nationalist along with her working-class politics. She saw the “Marxists of color” in the ATM working with other groups of color on the left.81 Montaño recalls receiving the readings about a week before a study group meeting and then coming together to discuss the topic for the week. The readings and discussion topics were “real complex” and dif- ficult to understand, but study group leaders broke down the material.82 In particular, she recalls a “stone cold working class” activist breaking down the most complex readings during her study sessions. She also remembers others like Bill Gallegos being “brilliant” but maintaining a “much more intellectual discourse.” The “beauty” of the study groups for Montaño was that members could raise questions without feeling 80 Scholar Laura Pulido declares gender relations in ATM were “not as oppressive” as other Chicana/o Left organizations such as CASA. Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left Radical Activism in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 203. 81 Theresa Montaño, interview by author, August 22, 2018. 82 Ibid. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 107 like they were taking a traditional college course. Instead, members understood the study groups as spaces where working people could find support while working toward meaningful change. Thus, Montaño remembers how meetings revolved around the read- ings but also the practical work and experiences of the members of the organization. Montaño especially enjoyed building relationships with other women in the ATM. Prior to events and during the recruitment process, the women would sit down, have coffee, and talk. Developing relationships was vital for both the organization and Montaño person- ally. She even at one point recruited a woman who would become her comadre.83 She claims they were conscious that “whoever we recruited there was a friendship as well.” Even if someone chose not to join the organization, it did not mean they severed friendships. The ATM’s study groups were not without fault, though. Like most organizations of the New Communist movement, the ATM romanticized Marxist texts. For example, Arturo Diaz, a librarian in Southern Cal- ifornia, joined the ATM’s study group in Orange County, California, from 1974 to 1977.84 Although Diaz attended ATM reading groups, public forums, and discussions for over three years, he ultimately decided not to join the organization, indicating a contradiction. He was drawn to the ATM by his interest in Latina/o and Chicana/o struggles. Diaz, how- ever, objected to the ATM’s nationalist tendencies and almost religious adherence to Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist texts. According to Diaz, study group members quoted the texts like the Third International of the Soviet Union as if they were quoting the bible.85 He came to see ATM members as “evangelicals” because of their book worshiping—something Mao had explicitly warned against.86 83 The literal translation is co-mother. It represents a close relationship that people build via bap- tizing someone else’s child and serving as god parents. It can also indicate a close-knit, kin-like relationship between two people or between two couples. This indicates the level of closeness among ATM comrades. 84 Arturo Diaz, interview by author February 28, 2018. 85 Ibid. 86 Mao Zedong, also referred to as Mao Tse-Tung, argued that activists needed to work and live among the activists they sought to organize. In his case, he was discussing people such as rural farmers as well as those at the point of industrial production. Many activists in the later portion of the 1960s and 1970s that followed China’s model of socialism took a practical approach to serving their communities. Mao Tse-Tung, On Practice and On Contradiction (London: Verso Press, 2007). This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 108 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly For Diaz, the ATM was too dogmatic and out of touch with current conditions affecting the Latina/o communities they sought to serve. According to Diaz, ATM members relied on early twentieth-century texts produced under tsarist and other tyrannical regimes and mimicked those conditions. Diaz remembers ATM members trying to emulate the clandestine nature and conditions under which Lenin and Mao wrote some of their most significant works. According to Diaz, this performa- tivity, in combination with actions like putting his phone in the freezer, drove him and several Orange County recruits away from the ATM. State Surveillance and the ATM The ATM’s adherence to the Marxist canon and its desire to build an anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist revolution immediately caught the attention of FBI agents. Although all names are redacted in the FBI files, evidence suggests many of the ATM’s founding members had been under the watchful eye of the state for years. When these activists joined forces in 1974, FBI agents took notice and meticulously began tracking ATM members’ activities and movements. The FBI’s activities, in turn, played a role in determining the ATM’s broader trajectory, which forced the group underground and fed members’ suspicions. The history of the ATM thus is inseparable from the history of state surveillance. FBI documents indicate that when Bill Gallegos and others formed the ATM, they already had years of experience with the police state.87 Police, local agencies, and FBI agents drew on tactics used against Black Power activists. For example, ATM founding member Beto Flores wit- nessed first-hand the FBI’s attempts to neutralize the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles. Flores recalls exchanging literature with the BPP as a member of the Oxnard Brown Berets. Upon leaving a meeting with the Panthers, Flores noticed ten unmarked cars and a helicopter following him and his comrades. According to Flores, police signaled them off the road and forcibly searched their vehicle while holding shotguns to their heads. Officers then claimed to find an unloaded gun in the glove 87 Historian Ernesto Chávez collected a wide range of FBI documents relating to ATM, the Brown Berets, La Raza Unida Party, Los Siete, and other organizations from the Chicana/o movement. Chavez collection, UCLA CSRC. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 109 compartment. “I’m wondering if they planted that gun. I wonder if they did,” Flores recalled.88 Given Flores’s account, it is no surprise that activists looked back on their prior interactions with police when deciding ATM’s policies and security measures, including the imposition of a lengthy proba- tion period for membership and anonymity on all documents. Even the location of the group’s founding congress reflected a preoccupa- tion with security. Former National Chairman Cruz Olmeda Becerra recalls that Northern California was “too hot,” so the four collectives settled on meeting in Los Angeles instead. Beyond their obsession with the Panthers, Northern California police were on high alert following the Symbionese Liberation Army’s February 1974 abduction of Patricia Hearst, granddaughter of American publishing giant William Randolph Hearst.89 Given this reality, congress attendees knew they needed armed security. As Bill Gallegos recalls, “This is in the summertime, so it was hot as hell; there is me and a few other people wearing overcoats as we have shotguns underneath. We were wearing a bulletproof vest heavy as hell, sweating like crazy, standing on stage and at the doors.”90 FBI agents also worried about ATM’s claims of creating an armed revolution in the United States as conducted in other countries through- out what was then known as the Third World. Gallegos’s example of carrying a shotgun at the ATM’s founding indicates that ATM members owned guns. Beto Flores also recalls having practiced shooting guns in rural areas.91 The examples of shooting target practice, being heavily armed at the founding of the organization, and the image of an armed horse rider on the cover of Fan the Flames confirm that the ATM was at least partially serious about armed insurrection. The rhetoric was also just as worrisome for some FBI agents.92 Despite these precautions, the ATM and its members were on the FBI’s radar as early as July 1974. On July 20, 1976, federal agents in San Francisco sent a thirty-five-page internal security memo to other offices. 88 Roberto Flores, interview by author, August 14, 2017. 89 Cruz Olmeda Becerra, interview by author, June 16, 2017. 90 Bill Gallegos, interview by author, March 2, 2018. 91 Roberto Flores, interview by author, August 14, 2017. 92 Memorandum from Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco to Director, FBI. July 26, 1976, 15, box 1, folder 27, Chavez Collection, UCLA CSRC. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 110 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly The report provided a lengthy overview of the ATM, its membership, and their activities. According to the FBI, the ATM operated units in Los Angeles, Oxnard, the East Bay, San Francisco, San Jose, Salinas, and Orange County in California; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and El Paso, Texas. Membership numbers varied chapter by chapter, some of which were significantly bigger than others. Altogether, agents estimated the ATM to have about 100 members, up from approximately 75 in 1974.93 The FBI also obtained information on the ATM’s finances. According to surveillance reports, the ATM collected monthly dues from members and would hold occasional fundraisers. In addition, the group collected small donations at forums and public meetings. Ads found within the ATM’s political organ, the Revolutionary Cause, also generated income, as advertisers paid twenty-five cents to a dollar fifty. Meanwhile, subscrip- tion rates for Revolutionary Cause fell at three dollars per year for domestic addresses or four dollars for addresses outside of the U.S. Donation requests could be found within the pages of the Revolutionary Cause. With a donation of twenty or more dollars, the donor would receive a subscription to the newspaper and all the ATM’s pamphlets and printed materials as they were published. In addition to reporting on the size and finances of the group, FBI agents noted the inner workings of the organization and kept tabs on all ATM forums and meetings. The FBI employed the common tactic of analyzing organization documents and flyers to figure out when and where ATM forums and other public meetings occurred. For example, in a memo dated September 14, 1976, agents from the Los Angeles offices requested information regarding past forums on the Chicano national question. Officers from national headquarters responded with informa- tion on forums held in San Jose, San Diego, Los Angeles, Denver, Albu- querque, and El Paso between August 27 and September 12. Included in the agent’s response was a copy of a bilingual flyer announcing an 93 This is a low estimate, given how many members were underground, which meant the number could have been greater. Some fellow travelers were also in study groups for up to 2 years with- out formal member status. These factors make it difficult to estimate how many people claimed membership in the ATM at any given time. “AUGUST TWENTYNINTHMOVEMENT,” JULY 20, 1976, 12, box 1, folder 27, Chavez Collection, UCLA CSRC. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 111 ATM forum at the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles at 7:00 p.m. on August 29, 1976.94 Meanwhile, agents scoured telephone directories in Oakland and meticulously recorded the phone numbers of ATM members for future use. They also listened in on private phone calls, including one that furnished information about where the ATM would hold forums in Los Angeles, Oakland, and New Mexico. Special agents discovered where the ATM produced and sold documents; several members who lived at a location known as La Raza House printed “large numbers of various ATM documents there and engaged in other activities,” one report read.95 According to FBI documents, three ATM members were registered to La Raza Unida Party, while a fourth member was registered as a Democrat in San Francisco.96 Surveillance reports also indicate that federal agents closely mon- itored the ATM’s publications. Agents made note of articles that drew on the theorizations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Clipped excerpts from the group’s newspaper, Revolutionary Cause, reveal that FBI agents were particularly interested in the group’s relationship to trade unions.97 According to one report, most members “secured jobs in factories and joined unions in accordance with ATM policy.” ATM members had become established in at least “20 factories or plants and 12 unions,” the report read, “for the purpose of acting as Factory Nuclei and Trade Union factions.” Agents were particularly fearful of ATM members’ attempts to teach Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to work- ers. They feared that the formation of Marxist-Leninist study groups within unions would push workers to overthrow the bourgeoisie, seize state power, and install Communist Party rule. The “central and most urgent task of Marxist-Leninists,” one report read, “is the formation of a 94 Memorandum from Assistant Director in Charge Los Angeles to Director, FBI, September 14, 1976, box 1, folder 27, Chavez Collection, UCLA CSRC. 95 “AUGUST TWENTYNINTHMOVEMENT,” JULY 20, 1976, 7, box 1, folder 27, Chavez Collection, UCLA CSRC. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 13, box 1, folder 27. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 112 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly multinational Communist Party.”98 Joining such a party, they reasoned, was tantamount to committing seditious conspiracy or treason. The FBI was correct in surmising that ATM members obtained jobs and leadership positions within labor unions. The ATM established itself in factories and companies such as Dasco (paper products), Western Yarn, Safeway Distributing, Steel Casting, Goodyear Rubber, Pacific Telephone, and others ranging from agricultural work to auto produc- tion and telephone communications. Among the unions where the ATM established factions were the United Steelworkers of America, Local 2058; Teamsters Local 853; International Molders and Allied Workers, Local 164; Textile Workers Union of America, Local 915; Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers; and seven others.99 ATM members held leadership positions within many of these. For example, Bill Gallegos and Liann Hurst helped elect Joe Navarro as president of Pacific Steel Casting in Emeryville at twenty-one years of age. Navarro held the position for six years, attributing his success to a multinational alliance between Latina/o and Portuguese workers, who were his base.100 He and others pushed for the union to print official union business in Spanish and Portuguese for language equality. He also led struggles for wage increases and affirmative action to hire more minority workers.101 Even if ATM members did not convert all union workers to their communist beliefs, Navarro’s experience suggests that ATM activists successfully pushed unions and workplaces toward the left. While the ATM’s involvement in unions generated outright alarm among agents of a proletariat revolution, the group’s affiliation with other communist groups—including the Black Workers Congress (BWC), the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO), and the October League—also alarmed them. Bill Gallegos remembers working closely with the Black Workers Congress and the Puerto Rican Revo- lutionary Workers Organization. The BWC arose around the League of 98 “AUGUST TWENTYNINTHMOVEMENT,” JULY 20, 1976, 7, box 1, folder 27, Chavez Collection, UCLA CSRC. 99 Ibid. 100 Joe Navarro, interview by author, June 3, 2017. 101 For coverage of a 1979 demonstration led by Navarro as Molders Union President see: League of Revolutionary Struggle, “Northern California Foundry Workers on Strike!” Unity Vol. 2 No. 5 (March 23–April 5, 1979). Green Library stacks, Stanford University. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 113 Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit while the PRRWO emerged from the New York Young Lords Party.102 Gallegos notes that ATM members held intimate study groups with members from both organizations prior to ATM’s public founding, seeking advice regarding the national ques- tion as well as infrastructure, politics, and strategy. ATM leaders even asked PRRWO leader and former Young Lords Party member Richie Perez to give the keynote address at the group’s founding congress.103 Perez’s solidarity statement as a Puerto Rican radical linked anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism as central tenets of the new relationship between PRRWO and ATM. The ATM also followed the BWC and the PRRWO in embracing Mao’s Communist China, reflecting a broader trend among communists of color who looked to China and Cuba as ideological influences.104 Such affiliations surely piqued the interest of FBI officers, who deemed multiracial alliances as subversive. FBI agents noted ATM members’ connections to the BWC and PRRWO almost immediately, and informants advised agents about joint meet- ings held in Oakland, Los Angeles, and New Mexico. FBI agents were particularly fearful of the National Continuations Committee, which attempted to create a new multinational Communist Party in 1974.105 During these meetings, PRRWO leaders spoke on the “National Liber- ation Struggle of Puerto Rico, the Role of Puerto Ricans in the Class Struggle, and Party Building.”106 Meanwhile, the BWC presented on the “National and Class Question and its Relation to Party Building.”107 The events suggest that the ATM began building connections with other racial and ethnic organizations and activists almost immediately. An October 1975 solidarity meeting between the ATM and PRRWO discussed the unity of their ideas of armed insurrection against the United States. 102 For more on these organizations plus the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement from which these groups emerged see: Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975). 103 For more on the Young Lords, PRRWO, and Richie Perez see: Johana Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Iris Morales, “Interview with Richie Perez.” Centro Journal 21, no. 2 (2009): 142–157. 104 Bill Gallegos, interview by author, March 2, 2018. 105 “AUGUST TWENTYNINTHMOVEMENT,” JULY 20, 1976, 25, box 1, folder 27, Chavez Collection, UCLA CSRC. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 114 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly The FBI’s fear of a new, multiracial vanguard Communist Party was not wholly unfounded, then. Such meetings only intensified the FBI’s interest in the ATM, which eventually earned the designations of being extremist matter (E.M.) and a threat to internal security (I.S.). Agents were therefore ready to increase neutralization attempts at a moment’s notice.108 Agents gathered much of their information through wire taps, photographic surveillance, and informants. One of their favorite tactics involved using informants to infiltrate chapters and push controversial agendas, all in the hope of creating organizational schisms and in-fighting. A significant example of this possibly occurred in Albuquerque, where the ATM had a growing chapter. New Mexico had become a prime location for ATM activists such as Cruz Olmeda Becerra who moved there and committed themselves to land grant struggles. According to prominent Chicana activist and writer Betita Martinez, New Mexicans were not averse to socialism or communism, and the ATM attracted serious attention from residents.109 Nevertheless, interactions between the ATM and Martinez were rocky. Martinez moved to New Mexico after having organized within the Black civil rights movement. Along with other women writers, she began the newspaper El Grito del Norte, which provided an internation- alist and feminist perspective on civil rights struggles occurring in New Mexico, especially land grant battles led by Reies Lopez Tijerina. When Martinez left the state to help her ailing father, she found that the ATM had taken over the Chicano Communications Center she and others had built.110 She and others claim that some individuals destroyed two projects, most notably the second printing of the bilingual book 450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, later updated to 500 Years of Chicano History.111 According to Martinez, the ATM shredded the printing because it did not take a position on Soviet social-imperialism or the Chicano 108 Airtel from Director, FBI to SACs: Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, New York, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, 1 box 1, folder 30, Chavez Collection, UCLA CSRC. 109 Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, “A View From New Mexico: Recollections of the Movimiento Left” Monthly Review 54, no. 3 (July, 2002). https://monthlyreview.org/2002/07/01/a-view-from-new -mexico/ 110 Martinez, “A View From New Mexico.” 111 Elizabeth Martinez, 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures (Albuquerque: Southwest Community Resources, 1994). This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms augus t 29t h mov em en t 115 national question. At the same time, Martinez faced attacks from ATM affiliates who called her a bourgeois feminist. Beholden to their sectarian ideas, ATM members destroyed everything that Albuquerque’s grassroots activists had built. Martinez eventually moved to the Bay Area, where she met with groups in Oakland, including representatives from the ATM. These representatives claimed that police had infiltrated their Albuquerque branch. Gallegos, who was on the central committee at the time, recalls suspecting two activists as undercover provocateurs behind the book burning.112 Certainly, it was not beyond the FBI to use tactics such as dis- rupting the book’s publication or attacking Betita’s character. Reflecting on the times, Martinez says, “That kind of thing was going on in those years, late ’60s, early ’70s. And all the different movements, including the movements of color, were being undermined, attacked, or attempted to be destroyed by government forces.”113 The clash of ATM and Chicana/o movement activists in New Mex- ico indicated an attempt to “completely undermine, derail, or whatever you want to call it, the efforts of the Chicano Communications Cen- ter,” according to Martinez. Destroying the book, her reputation, and everybody’s trust was typical of government infiltration. The ATM never recovered from the incident in New Mexico. The Albuquerque chapter broke away shortly thereafter, and members stopped speaking with the activists there. Even if the FBI was not behind the book’s destruction, activists like Gallegos adamantly believed that infiltration was a serious threat to the ATM’s survival. Given this likelihood, ATM members tried to evade agents’ efforts. Bill Gallegos recalls how the group’s central committee eluded officers. The committee often met at Gallegos’s home near Pasadena, Califor- nia. Members would park their cars blocks away and carry their Marx- ist books in grocery bags, all to avoid detection. Gallegos recalls, “We thought we were slick hiding from the state. It actually probably drew more attention to us.” Gallegos was right. The group’s tactics did not attract police scrutiny but rather unwanted attention from Gallegos’s 112 Bill Gallegos, interview by author, March 2, 2018. 113 Martinez, “A View From New Mexico.” This content downloaded from 132.174.234.153 on Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:58:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 116 sou t her n ca li for n i a qua rt er ly landlord. The landlord eventually evicted Gallegos, thinking he was a drug dealer. Gallegos’s account highlights two key facts about the ATM. On the one hand, that the ATM used Gallegos’s apartment for central committee meetings reveals the group’s determination to build a com- munist revolution, even if they had to do so out of their own homes. In this regard, the story suggests the crucial importance of private homes as sites of revolutionary organizing.114 On the other hand, Gallegos’s account hints at how ATM members’ fears and suspicions led them to draw more attention unto themselves.115 Beyond concealing their meeting locations, ATM members relied on pseudonyms, initials, and vague communications to disguise their iden- tities. For example, former ATM member Eric Mann recalls receiving a strange phone call after attending a forum featuring New Communist movement groups in Berkeley in 1974. Mann attended the forum with his future wife, Lian Hurst. Like Theresa Montaño, Mann and Hurst appreciated the ATM speakers’ calls for activists to enter factories at the point of production. Mann received what he described as an odd tele- phone call following the Berkeley forum. Without introducing himself, the caller cryptically said, “That thing, that thing from the other day, you are in.” At first, Mann could not figure out what the message meant or who was on the other line. It took several minutes for him to realize he was being recruited into an ATM study group.116 Being invited to join a study group did not mean Mann was auto- matically a member, though. Study groups served as an additional screening process, determining who could become a full member while also sniffing out potential infiltrators. All new members served a pro- bationary period. For some people, this period la

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