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Elizabeth Martinez
97 quotes
“ours is an age of intensified empire-building in which no war is unthinkable.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2003 preface to Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean edited by Jennifer Browdy
“…it’s just another front in the battle against racism. And that’s what it was, because New Mexico was much more colonial than any other area, but it was all the same damn racism. And so I never felt like I was breaking any life pattern; I was just shifting to another front.…”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how she joined the Chicano Movement in “ELIZABETH (BETITA) MARTINEZ” (Voices of Feminism Oral History Project; 2006)
“I didn’t want to be ahead, I wanted to be with the people in the moment. But, you end up being ahead because you’re different. That’s the irony of it.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview (2011)
“Women do both, raise a family and participate in the struggle, we have to make them connect.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview (2011)
“All over the country today, La Raza is in motion. A spirit of awakening runs through the big city barrios, small towns, colleges and universities, the countryside. Our people are refusing to be filled with shame any longer, they are refusing to be oppressed, they are demanding liberation and a decent life...They are working on problems like working conditions and pay, education, welfare rights, housing, child care, police brutality. They are forming groups of women with names like Las Chicanas and Las Adelitas.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we know that more Chicanas must become involved. It is our job as Chicanas to wake them up, encourage them to see that they have a responsibility larger than their immediate families-a responsibility to the whole familia of La Raza, the whole family of oppressed peoples. And a responsibility to their own un-used talents, brain, energy.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact is, nothing could be more truly Chicana than the Chicana who wants to be more than a wife, mother, housekeeper. That limited concept of women did not exist under our Indian ancestors for whom the woman was a creative person in the broadest sense and central to the cultural life of the tribe. Later in Mexican history, we find that the woman has played every possible role-including that of fighter on the front lines.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is the true Raza tradition, a communal tradition”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Revolutionary Chicanas want the liberation of our people and of all oppressed peoples. We do not want to become page-girls in President Richard Nixon's Congress the most recent bone tossed to "women's liberation.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not want a few Chicanas to get better jobs, higher salaries, while everyone else continues to be exploited.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“revolution means turning things upside down and taking another look at what is taken for granted. So revolution means new ideas about relations between men and women, too.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history and problems of La Chicana are similar to those of Latin-American women. Although the native Indian women of the Americas was, before the Spanish conquest, far from being completely free, she often participated more fully in the life of the society than did her sister under Spanish rule. The coming of the European, with his Catholic Church and feudal social system, was a turning point. Our roots lie in the act of rape: the rape of women, the rape of an entire continent and its people.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today we can say that the Chicana suffers from a triple oppression. She is oppressed by the forces of racism, imperialism and sexism.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Chicana may be working 16 hours a day to support for her children, but she will still be viewed as a sexual object rather than a human being. Unless she is over the age of 35 or 40, she will be seen more as a face and body than as a fellow worker and fellow victim of oppression.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We will not win our liberation struggle unless the women move together with the men rather than against them. We must work to convince the men that our struggle will become stronger if women are not limited to a few, special roles. We also have the right to expect that our most enlightened men will join in the fight against sexism; it should not be our battle alone.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They perceive how our oppressor uses "machismo" against us-for example, by appealing to a Chicano's sense of supposed manhood in order to get him to kill Vietnamese. Sexism is a useful tool to the colonizer; the men are oppressed but they can beat and mistreat women, who thus serve as targets for a frustration that might otherwise become revolutionary. Some men understand very well that the full participation of women is needed if our people are to win the liberation struggle.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth is that we need to reexamine and redefine our culture. Some of us do not believe that in our culture, femininity has always meant: weak, passive delicate looking... in other words, qualities that inflate the male ego. The women of La Raza is traditionally a fighter and revolutionary.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The revolutionary Chicana does not identify with the so-called women's liberation movement in the United States because up to now that movement has been dominated by white women of middle class background.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the women's liberation movement has rejected traditional family. For us, the family has been a source of unity and our major defense against the oppressor.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Up to now, the U.S. women's liberation movement has been mainly concerned with sexism and ignored or denied the importance of racism. For the Chicana, the three types of oppression cannot be separated. They are all a part of the same system, they are three faces of the same enemy.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have to fight together because there is a common enemy. Especially if you are up against an administration being divisive, I think everybody has to come together and form an alliance or a set of goals together. There are various forms of working together. A coalition is one, a network is another, an alliance is yet another. And they are not the same; some of them are short-term, and some are long-term.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No “Oppression Olympics”!”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The seven African American students who sat down at that Woolworth’s lunch counter at the first sit-in, April 1, 1960, had no idea they were going to start a huge movement, a nationwide movement. No idea. They just did it. They got ketchup thrown on them and were beaten, arrested. But they took a chance There has to be some of that spirit today. Let’s experiment, we don’t have to have all the answers; we certainly don’t have to have the ideology down, you know, the whole package. But let’s see some things that are wrong and try to change them, and take risks.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the past, Chicano often meant lower-class, with a negative connotation. During the Movement years, young Mexican Americans started to use "Chicano/Chicana" as an affirmation of pride and identity and to say, "We're not Mexicans or Americans. We're a combination -- a special population with our own history and culture.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...it should be called "push out" rather than "drop out.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's little recognition of the fact that almost one-third of the present-day United States used to be part of Mexico and, before that, Native American lands. There's also little recognition of the vast wealth created by Mexican labor. The Southwest was essentially built by Mexican, along with Chinese and Filipino, workers -- yet Mexicans are seen strictly as immigrants and not as "real" Americans.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our struggle isn't just for tolerance. It isn't just about saying that everybody should be respected or that all cultures have value. It's recognizing that domination exists, and we're combating that domination when we try to teach differently. Respect is a goal, but you can't get there without recognizing what's in the way and understanding why it's so difficult. We have to go beyond tolerance. The answer to "divide and conquer" is "unite and overcome.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us all remember: history makes us and we the people make history”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A last gift of the letters should be mentioned. They show how vital is the need, especially though not only, for young whites to take the initiative in changing their consciousness about racism. To seek out a different perspective from the one they have always known. To listen to what Black, Latino, and other oppressed peoples say in one way or another. For a new consciousness does not come automatically but with persistent effort.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Without a book like this] you would not hear about our tradition of female resistance to oppression, going back to Aztec women who took to the rooftops in what later became Mexico City and ‘rained down darts and stones’ on the invading Spaniards. Or the woman who filed suit in Oaxaca against her husband for abuse and had her case heard in court-in 1630! Or the Maya women who locked up the local Spanish priest in his church for not having Maya victims of a typhus epidemic buried in church ground. And the massive ‘Corn Riots’ of 1692 by women who refused to starve.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ask almost anyone outside of academia to name famous US women of Mexican origin and you will probably hear ‘Dolores Huerta.’ If the person knows our contemporary writers, maybe ‘Sandra Cisneros’ and ‘Ana Castillo.’ If you ask for a name from earlier times, you might get ‘Sor Juana’-the rebel nun of the 1600’s. When you try to dig deeper, your companion may whimper, ‘I give up! Well…there’s the Virgin of Guadalupe, she’s on a lot of T-shirts. It was inevitable, then, that the need for a book like this would be recognized.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the Chicano movement began, we saw Chicanas and others in New Mexico working to get back land lost with the 1846-48 US war, thousands walking out of high schools to protest the racism, and many putting on Brown Berets to defend their communities. We joined the United Farm Workers as campesinas and boycott supporters. Thousands of us marched against the Vietnam war on August 29, 1970, only to be chased and struck down by tear-gassing police who also killed three Chicanos that day”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem of locating photos often confirms the indifference to women’s presence in history, as reflected in the media, books, historical records, museums, university libraries.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The collective memory of every Latino people includes direct or indirect (neo-)colonialism, primarily by Spain or Portugal and later by the United States. Among Latinos, Mexicans in what we now call the Southwest have experienced US colonialism the longest and most directly, with Puerto Ricans not far behind (“A Word About the Great Terminology Question”)”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“an obsession with self-definition can become a trap if that is all we think about, all we debate. If liberation terminology becomes an end in itself and our only end, it ceases to be a tool of liberation. Terms can be useful, even vital tools, but the house of La Raza that is waiting to be built needs many kinds. (“A Word About the Great Terminology Question ”)”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The oppression and exploitation of Latinos (like Asians) have historical roots unknown to most Americans. People who learn at least a little about Black slavery remain totally ignorant about how the United States seized half of Mexico or how it has colonized Puerto Rico. (“Seeing More Than Black and White”)”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The march reminded us that at one time 17 million Americans boycotted grapes not picked by unionized farmworkers. (“Walking with César”)”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plagued by Western habits of either-or, dualistic thinking, we all may fail to understand that race, class and gender interconnect to sustain a corporate ruling class. In the language of African-American essayist bell hooks, they are interlocking systems of oppression. Neither Latina nor Anglo women should yield to the temptation of making a hierarchy of oppressions where battles are fought over whether racism is "worse" than sexism, or class oppression is "deeper" than racism, etc. Instead of hierarchies we need bridges. (“Listen up, Anglo Sisters”)”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To build unity requires recognizing the central role of young activists. They are vigorously fighting the attack on this century's Reconstruction. Their anger at today's ugly society often translates into a passionate drive for unity across color lines. (Afterword)”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We need to see how dance, music, theater, art, poetry, are major arenas for alliance-building, especially among youth. Culture can usher in new visions (Afterword)”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are all inseparable from our times, whether we realize it or not.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here is a call, a most urgent call, for Rainbow Warriors: something ancient, something new.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In two books about the cultural flowering of the 1960s, the many volumes of Chicano poetry, short stories, songs, and skits go unmentioned. In two books on the underground press, Robert Glessing's The Underground Press in America and Abe Peck's Uncovering the Sixties, you will find no mention of Chicano movement newspapers in the first (except for two listings in its appendix) and two references in the second. Yet there was a Chicano Press Association comprising 60 newspapers and magazines in those years.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It does not help that former Latino activists themselves have written so little. At least four leaders of white student protest (Richard Flacks, Todd Gitlin, Tom Hayden and Paul Potter) have published books of history and analysis about the 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, activists from SNCC, the Black Panther Party and other Black groups have done so. But relatively few such works have come from Chicanos/as thus far. More movement participants at all levels should move to shine some light on our histories of activism.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We should also recall the exclusively Black-white model of race relations, which makes all other peoples invisible. It is not surprising that two dozen white writers who have been conditioned to see the struggles of Asian/Pacific Island Americans, Latinos and Native Americans as minor would write their books accordingly.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what frightens U.S. ruling-class circles is the linking of issues, strategies and, above all, people in struggle. What frightens them most is the prospect of grassroots alliances across national or racial lines. Progressives have no business falling prey to the dominant society's common view that the problem of racism is minorities feeling dissatisfied, rather than a lethal poison in the spirit and the body of our entire society. The cure is a whole new world that only a sense of our global linkage, of interdependence, can breathe into life.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In actuality, the 1960s was an era of interconnection across lines of sex and race, time and space. But with rare exceptions, these authors are guilty of fragmenting the movement.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every society has an origin narrative that explains that society to itself and the world with a set of stories and symbols. The origin myth, as scholar-activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has termed it, defines how a society understands its place in the world and its history. The myth provides the basis for a nation's self-defined identity. Most origin narratives can be called myths because they usually present only the most flattering view of a nation's history; they are not distinguished by honesty. Ours begins with Columbus "discovering" a hemisphere where some 80 million people already lived”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The origin myth's omissions are grotesque. It ignores three major pillars of our nationhood: genocide, enslavement and imperialist expansion. The massive extermination of indigenous peoples provided our land base; the enslavement of African labor made our economic growth possible; and the seizure of half of Mexico by war (or threat of renewed war) extended this nation's boundaries north to the Pacific and south to the Rio Grande. Such are the foundation stones of the United States, within an economic system that made this country the first in world history to be born capitalist.”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seems nostalgia runs rampant among many Euro-Americans: a nostalgia for the days of unchallenged White Supremacy-both moral and material-when life was 'simple.'”
Elizabeth Martinez (1925–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source