Episode 10: Chicana/o Uprising

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Joel Zapata to discuss his essay “The South-by-Southwest Borderlands’ Chicana/o Uprising: the Brown Berets, Black and Brown Alliances, and the Fight against Police Brutality in West Texas.” The piece emerged out of Zapata’s involvement with the groundbreaking Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project and appears in Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas, published in 2021 by the University of Texas Press. The interview covers a range of topics, including: the social contradictions of the Jim Crow and Juan Crow systems in West Texas (as exemplified by the public cemetery in Lubbock); the role of police brutality in sparking the Chicana/o movement in Lubbock, Odessa, and Midland; the 1971 “March of Faith” and the 1978 beating death of Larry Ortega Lozano, both crucial turning points in the history of this movement; how these events helped lead to collaborations between Black and Brown social-justice organizations in the region; and the police brutality experienced by members of the white working-class in Amarillo in the 1970s. Zapata also discusses his other research in Mexican-American history, including his digital history project, “Chicana/o Activism in the Southern Plains through Time and Space,” which maps the events described in the article and outlines the role of student organizers at places like Texas Tech in Lubbock and West Texas State (now West Texas A&M) in Canyon.