RE: [Marxism] French elections

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Lause writes, "This implies that the black or Chicano community
launched these parties and the rest of the working class failed to support
them.  The fact is that the La Raza Unida Party, for example, never got more
than a tiny percentage of the Chicago voters in Texas, Colorado and other
states."

Mark misremembers the facts. 

>From the Handbook of Texas online: 

*  *  *

The Raza Unida Party was established on January 17, 1970, at a meeting of
300 Mexican Americans at Campestre Hall in Crystal City, Texas.... The party
fielded candidates for nonpartisan city council and school board races the
following April in Crystal City, Cotulla, and Carrizo Springs and won a
total of fifteen seats, including two city council majorities, two school
board majorities, and two mayoralties....

[In the 1972 gubernatorial elections] The RUP platform that [gubernatorial
candidate Ramsey] Muñiz put before voters, while emphasizing
Mexican-American community control, bilingual education, and women's and
workers' rights, bore similarity to the values espoused by the liberal
faction of the state Democratic party, which supported Frances (Sissy)
Farenthold for the party's gubernatorial nomination. In spite of this, Muñiz
did not receive strong support from liberals. Ultimately, even Farenthold
endorsed Dolph Briscoe, to whom she had lost the nomination, although she
had once referred to him as "a bowl of pablum." Muñiz won 6 percent
(214,149) of the votes in the November election, thus reducing Briscoe's
margin of victory so that the race was the first in the twentieth century in
which a Texas governor was elected with less than a majority. Muñiz won
heavily in some South Texas counties and had a decent turnout in large
cities. Over the next two years RUP solidified its South Texas rural base
and racked up more nonpartisan victories in the Winter Garden Region. It
also achieved political successes in Kyle and Lockhart....

RUP did not fare well in the 1974 general election. Muñiz got only 190,000
votes and posed no real threat to Briscoe's reelection. In addition, none of
the sixteen candidates for the state House garnered enough support to win.
The party's sole real victories were in Crystal City, where cofounder
Gutiérrez was elected as Zavala county judge and the party successfully
defended its dominance of other county offices. Nonetheless, by its numerous
victories in South Texas, RUP had achieved Mexican-American political
dominance in some cities and altered the state's political life.

*  *  *

To judge these figures --6% of the statewide vote in 1972-- you need to take
into account that Hispanics were less than 18% of the Texas population then,
but of course the proportion of Hispanic voters was much smaller. (I could
not find figures for Texas but nationwide, the turnout for voting-age
Latinos that year was pegged at 37.5% by the Federal Elections Commission;
and at 64.5% for anglos; in 1994, Latino turnout was 22.9%, the Anglo was
double that, 46.3%).

This would suggest that in Texas in those years Latinos were at most 10%-12%
of the voters, and of those, half or more voted for Raza Unida in the
statewide race and of course the big majority voted for Raza Unida in a
several-county area where the party was strongest. Texas would have had one
of the lower numbers because it was one of the main areas where
non-immigrants from Mexico were 
Concentrated and because the Hispanic population even then was younger than
the overall population (so while Latinos may have been 17% of the overall
population, they may only have been 15% of the VAP).

So there's really no question but that Raza Unida was a very real mass party
of the Chicano people statewide and especially in southern Texas. And, yes,
the response of the Anglo majority was null.

Just one more bit of evidence that, viewed as a political *subject* or
*protagonist*, "the working class" in the United States is MIA, and has been
for a half century or more. 

Which, of course, places a rather substantial roadblock on the way to
independent working class political action.

That this has a tremendous impact on the politics of the nationally
oppressed communities is like, duh. The point is not to "idealize" the
politics of oppressed national communities but to *understand* them.

Joaquín



________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism