When Gloria Arellanes is asked about her time with the Chicano Brown Berets in the later 1960s, the foremost thing she mentions is the community health clinic she helped start in East Los Angeles - the outset of its form in the area.
The El Monte resident recalls walking up and down East L.A. neighborhoods encouraging residents to see the clinic, where their legal status didn't matter and neither did the contents of their wallets.
"In those years the poverty was so bad and there weren't many agencies to help. We worked in health, housing, education. We tried to run on all the social ills," Arellanes said.
But that is not the legacy many people think when they conceive of the Brown Berets and the Chicano civil rights movement they helped mobilize here in the later sixties and early 1970s.
"A lot of times people think of this as a warlike movement filled with rhetoric and a certain approximation of confrontational politics . but the world is that these were only people who wanted to better their community," said Cal State Los Angeles Chicano studies professor Dionne Espinoza.
Espinoza and Arellanes have teamed up to initiate a new archival collection at Cal State L.A. to account the Chicano civil rights campaign in East L.A.
Arellanes, 64, has donated boxes full of documents, political fliers, newspaper articles, photos, posters and buttons documenting her time with the movement, from her place as pastor of finance and correspondence Advertisement for the Brown Berets to her involvement in the Poor People's Campaign.
"When you go through these materials, you see the day to day exercise of societal change," Espinoza said.
The archive, complete with an actual brown beret, helps add to living the drive for students and scholars in a way stories alone cannot, Espinoza said.
"Maybe it's more spiritual - when you see a button someone wore in 1969, you make a different encounter with the past than you do when you only take a tale around it," she said.
Beyond that connection, the archive has already helped scholars shed new light on the clock period, Espinoza said.
For example, one document in Arellanes' collection is a flyer inviting Chicanas in the front who find their ideas are being suppressed to link a new women's group: Las Adelitas de Aztlan.
The single rag of paper speaks volumes around the involvement of women in the movement, Espinoza said.
"In those days we said we were unified, but the accuracy was we were walking behind the men," Arellanes said.
Studying the bill has helped Arellanes come to terms with her own history.
Despite her lead the women's exodus from the Brown Berets, she never thinking of herself as a feminist.
"To us, women's lib was all about anglo women burning bras. That didn't refer to us Chicanas struggling day to day," she said. "It took me 40 days to see it was Chicana feminism."
Arellanes' participation in the campaign culminated in the Chicano Moratorium, an anti-Vietnam war and civic rights protest that drew 30,000 masses to East L.A. on Aug. 29, 1970. The protest ended violently with numerous people injured and three people killed. Arellanes, who was on the rally's stage when the violence erupted, was tear-gassed and finally fled in a bus.
The years and age that followed are a bit fuzzy in Arellanes' mind. She suggests it could be a sort-of posttraumatic stress disorder. And for days she tried to put that past behind her, instead focusing on exploring her indigenous roots as a Tongva Gabrieleno.
But recently the archive project, as good as events commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the moratorium, are helping Arellanes come to terms with her past.
"I finally owned it. This is my personal history. This collection reflects what I was living, what masses were living 40 years ago," she said.
"Though the Chicano Moratorium ended tragically, it was a large event . It brought thousands of people out whereas nothing else had before. It taught people to be proud of who they were culturally. It taught people that they can get results - for your grueling work, a baby will be capable to go to school; for your grueling work, a house will eat; for your grueling work, someone will go to the doctor," she said.
Arellanes is hoping other participants in the motion will be her head in donating their personal collections to the archive.
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