28
moderate, knowledgeable of the dominant political system, relatively young, well educated,
politically articulate and visible and accessible to the media.”
100
According to political scientist Isidro Ortiz, in the post-movement era, the leadership of the
major Latino political organizations was no longer reliant on the involvement of a local, mass-
based membership.
101
Instead, organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and
Education Fund and the National Council of La Raza developed a more “professionalized” rather
than “participatory” approach to politics: Membership today consists largely of political elites
who “carry out the organization’s activities and rely upon corporate contributions for the
resources necessary to maintain the organization.”
102
In contrast to the movement’s militant
nationalism, activists and leaders in the 1980s became increasingly engaged in a new strategy of
“corporate accommodation.”
103
As they struggled to protect programmatic gains in the face of
Reaganomics, national Latino advocacy increasingly turned to the corporate sector for additional
funding. According to Ortiz, this dependency on corporate funding led the major Latino
advocacy organizations to become “amplifiers of corporate deeds,” facilitating corporate efforts
to reshape public opinion in their favor.
Yet despite this shift in political culture, many Latino activists continued to engage in a more
participatory style of politics at the grass-roots level. Latino activists in California, for example,
continued to engage in a performative practices as a method of resistance and political education.
In San Jose, public performance was particularly effective in forging political alliances between
native-born Chicanos and undocumented workers from Mexico and Central and South America.
In “Citizens vs. Citizenry: Undocumented Immigrants and Latino Cultural Citizenship,” author
William Flores describes a group of activists in San Jose, California, who utilized performance
as a way to stimulate the claiming of political rights for a group who would initially seem to have
no claims to membership — immigrants living illegally in the United States.
In 1979, Chicano activists organized an ad hoc committee, the Comité pro Derecho de Los
Niños Indocumentados (Committee for the Rights of Undocumented Children). The committee
100
Villarreal and Hernandez, “Introduction,” xviii.
101
Isidro D. Ortiz, “Chicana/o Organizational Politics and Strategies in the Era of Retrenchment,”
Chicanas/Chicanos at the Crossroads: Social, Economic, and Political Change, eds. David Maciel and Isidro D.
Ortiz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996) 123.
102
Ortiz 117.
103
Ortiz 123.
Convention