La Raza Magazine: Chicano Movement, Voice & Resistance

The magazine dealt with immediate concerns– bigotry, hardship, education, and the Vietnam Battle– specifically the disproportionate drafting of Latino young people. La Raza talked straight to high school pupils, connecting their lived experience to wider political systems. In doing so, the publication not only reported on the movement– it became part of it.

Origins of La Raza Magazine

Eliezer Risco brought lessons from organizing with Cesar Chavez and El Malcriado, the United Ranch Workers’ paper. Ruth Robinson, the logistical foundation of La Raza, built the darkroom, ran journalism, and trained the next generation of Chicano writers– amongst them Anna Nieto Gomez, that would certainly come to be an introducing Chicana feminist.

In East Los Angeles throughout the late 1960s and ’70s, a group of young Chicano lobbyists transformed creating, photography, and art into devices for resistance. Their system: La Raza, a bilingual newspaper-turned-magazine that turned into one of the Chicano Activity’s many essential media voices. Through its pages, they recorded daily life, injustice, and protest– crafting a narrative and visual language that gave power to their areas and presence to their battles.

Impact on Chicano Activism

Over its ten-year run, La Raza educated organizers, digital photographers, and writers. Today, its vast archive is housed at UCLA, preserving a generation’s fight for justice– and the powerful, innovative voice they constructed to demand it.

Released in 1967 from the cellar of the Church of the Surprise in Lincoln Heights, La Raza was the unlikely development of a white clergyman, a Cuban refugee, and a young Stanford graduate. What started as a grassroots organizing job swiftly developed right into a powerful outlet for political expression, young people advocacy, and social identification.