55th Anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium

Chicano Moratorium

Ramses Noriega

Silkscreen, 1970

Los Angeles, CA

9298

Friday is the 55th anniversary of the first Chicano Moratorium. The Chicano Moratorium, formally known as the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, was a movement of Chicano anti-war activists that built a broad-based but fragile coalition of Mexican-American groups to organize opposition to the Viet Nam* War. Led by activists from local colleges and members of the "Brown Berets," a group with roots in the high school student movement that staged walkouts in 1968, the coalition peaked with an August 29, 1970 march in East Los Angeles that drew an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 demonstrators.

A police riot following the peaceful march resulted in many injuries, more than 150 arrests and four deaths, including Gustav Montag, Lyn Ward, José Diaz, and award-winning journalist Rubén Salazar, news director of the local Spanish television station and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Many activists continue to insist that Salazar was intentionally murdered because of his ongoing examination of rampant racism and police abuse within the LAPD and LA County Sheriff’s Department.

The artist was a founder of the Chicano Moratorium, and the poster features Rosalío Muñoz, the first Chicano student body president of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1969, Muñoz refused induction and burned his draft card in protest over Chicano casualties in Viet Nam. In 1970, he was co-chair of the Chicano Moratorium.

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*With the goal of decolonizing information, we would like to note the Vietnamese language is monosyllabic, and the divided spelling "Viet Nam" is the transliteration used by the Vietnamese. The single word "Vietnam" was utilized by the French, and thus connotes colonial status, not sovereignty.