Brown Berets

The Brown Berets were a militant Chicano (Mexican American) civil rights group, modeled in part on the African American Black Panther Party . Like the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets arose out of a desire to fight discrimination and especially to defend the Mexican American community from police brutality.

A youth group

The Brown Berets got their start at a Mexican American youth conference in East Los Angeles, California , in 1966, at which high school students gathered to discuss problems facing Mexican Americans. The students continued to work together over the next year, and their group took the name Young Chicanos for Community Action (YCCA).

In late 1967, the YCCA opened the Piranya Coffee House as a site from which to promote community consciousness and recruit members. The YCCA adopted a brown beret as a part of its uniform and thus became known as the Brown Berets. Emphasizing the right of self-determination and defense against aggression, the Brown Berets considered themselves nationalists—that is, they identified themselves first and foremost as Chicanos and rejected the idea that they should adjust their traditions and culture to assimilate (blend in) with the mainstream U.S. culture. They had a formal code of conduct and ethics.

In practice, the Brown Berets emphasized opposition to police brutality and discrimination in the schools. During the group's main period of activity—from 1967 through 1972—the Brown Berets developed more than twenty chapters and published the newspaper La Causa. In May 1969, the Brown Berets opened the East Los Angeles Free Clinic, offering a range of medical services.

The Brown Berets participated in the major events of the Chicano movement, including the East Los Angeles “Blow Outs,” organized demonstrations in which more than ten thousand students walked out of Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Belmont high schools to protest educational discrimination against Chicanos.

The Chicano Moratorium

In late 1969, the Brown Berets formed the Chicano Moratorium Committee, which organized annual marches to protest the large number of Chicano soldiers dying in the Vietnam War (1954–75). A year later, they called for a national Chicano Moratorium to protest not only the Vietnam War but also oppression by police. The Moratorium, held in Los Angeles in 1970, became one of the country's largest antiwar protests, with nearly twenty thousand people in attendance. Overreacting to a minor incident, the police attacked the peaceful demonstrators. In the ensuing violence, respected Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar (1928–1970) was killed.

In 1971, the Brown Berets conducted a March Through Aztlán, marching one thousand miles from Calexico, California, to the state's capital, Sacramento, to protest police brutality, racial discrimination, and the Vietnam War. In 1972, they occupied Santa Catalina Island off the Southern California coast, arguing that the island had not been specifically named in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War (1846–48) and resulted in Mexico ceding California to the United States. Therefore, according to the Brown Berets, the island still belonged to Mexico. In late 1972, in response to repeated harassment by police, the Brown Berets disbanded. In the 1990s and 2000s, local Brown Beret groups formed for many of the same purposes and with the same basic principles as the original group.