In the spring of 1966, inside a rented office space in New York City that smelled like cigarette smoke and mimeograph ink, a cadre of people worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pronounced “snick.” SNCC was one of many organizations, such as CORE, the SCLC, the NAACP, and others, working for the Civil Right Movement in the South. It had been a harrowing few years. 1964’s Freedom Summer had been successful in rallying more Americans to support Civil Rights but also sparked extreme backlash that resulted in volunteers being beaten, harassed, and even killed.
The director of the New York SNCC office was a woman who went by the name of Elizabeth Sutherland. By most accounts the New York office she ran has become the SNCC’s single largest source of funding, raising, by some estimates, three-quarters of SNCC’s national budget.
Sutherland had been putting in thirteen-hour days, seven days a week, while her young daughter was growing up mostly on her own. By 1966, workers in SNCC were tired, working long days and nights, and struggling against an American system that was not built, nor ever designed, for true equality. SNCC as an organization, began to turn away from its interracial organizational structure and began to push out white volunteers and workers. Sutherland described this years later in a single sentence: “I found myself unable to vote in SNCC because I was ‘white.’”
Except Sutherland wasn’t white, she wasn’t Black either.
This wasn’t the first time in her life she had been sorted based on her race. Thirty years earlier, growing up in a segregated Washington, D.C. suburb, she recalled the neighborhood children weren’t allowed to play with her “because I was Mexican.” Now, in an office she had helped build and fund for four years, she found herself on the other side of a racial line again, drawn this time by people she considered comrades.
Today’s episode is about Betita Martinez, who worked under a few names over the course of her life: Elizabeth or Liz Sutherland, Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, and Betita Martínez. We’ll explore how she came to lead the New York City SNCC office, what the move to exclude white volunteers meant inside the larger turn SNCC was making at the time, and what she did over the following four decades, much of it in New Mexico and California. Betita Martinez became one of the twentieth century’s most prolific writers and advocates for social justice. Her entire adult life was spent as a civil rights activist, a journalist who covered Cuba and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, a founding member of a New York radical feminist collective, and one of the key figures with the emergence of Chicana feminism.
I’m Elizabeth.
And I’m Marissa.
And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.
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Elizabeth: This episode, like all of our episodes, is based on secondary sources written by other historians and scholars. The idea for this episode first came to me this past spring while at the annual Organization of American Historians meeting in Philadelphia. I attended a panel on Latinx history of the United States and historian Stephen Pitti, who is a professor of History and American Studies at Yale, highlighted the work and legacy of Betita Martinez and argued that, to study Betita Martinez is to study Latinx history. Both because her life of activism shows how the Chicano movement and Chicana feminism grew and changed but also understanding Martinez’s ability to write Latinx history with a five-hundred year, hemispheric scope. Thus, it inspired me to write this episode. Martinez was a prolific writer. I’m linking a bibliography that librarian Kathryn Blackmer Reyes compiled of all Martinez’s writings, and it’s a doozy. In addition to Martinez’s own writing, I relied on articles by Tony Platt and other essayists in a special double issue of the journal Social Justice that celebrated Martinez’s life, work, and political activism. There’s also an oral history in the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project at Smith College of Martinez, interviewed by Loretta Ross and linked in the show notes. And just some notes on naming. Betita Martinez went by different names at different points in her life. I’ve chosen to call her Martinez throughout this episode because that is how she’s most known, and how I was introduced to her, but be aware that sometimes when we refer to Martinez, she might have been using her mother’s middle name of Sutherland at that time in her life. Also, we’ll be using various terms throughout the episode that need some context. First, the term Latinx, which is accepted verbiage among many scholars and activists to use for peoples of Latin American descent or heritage. Another similar term is Latine’. These terms are an attempt to undermine the gendered nature of language that uses Latino, the male describer, to describe those of all genders. For example, you might see Latino/a Studies but Latinx works as a gender-neutral and inclusive of queer and trans people. We’ll also mention the Chicano/a movement a few times, which came out of the late 1960s as the movement for Mexican American civil rights, but which isn’t a term that is typically used in modern vernacular. I honestly could spend an entire episode talking about naming and the reasons and values associated with naming the “Latin” experience, but that’s not the subject of this episode. If you are interested in learning more about naming, a great introduction is Ramon Gutierrez’s essay, “What’s in a Name: The Politics of Hispanic and Latino Panethnicities,” which is a reading I assign during the first week of my Latinx History of the U.S. class that I teach. Alright, let’s dive in.
Marissa: Elizabeth Martínez, “Betita” to her parents, grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in Chevy Chase, a segregated, white, middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C. She was the only child of Manuel Guillermo Martínez, who had witnessed the Mexican Revolution as a young man and worked as a clerk at the Mexican Embassy and eventually became a professor in Spanish literature at Georgetown University. Martinez reminisced, “Every night over dinner he would talk about seeing Zapata come into the capital with the campesinos, and that put the idea in my head that I wanted a revolution right here.”[1] Her mother, Ruth Sutherland Phillips, was white and born in the U.S. She held a master’s degree from George Washington University, taught advanced Spanish, and was a competitive tennis player, pianist, and bridge player. The family went to Mexico every summer.[2]
Elizabeth: At home, dinner was served at a large mahogany table, with her mother ringing a small bell for the maid to bring more food. By Martinez’s own description, her material circumstances were comfortable. However, she recalled feeling out of place in ways she couldn’t yet articulate. “I felt racism in the air,” she said, “but I did not have words for it then.” The girl next door wasn’t allowed to play with her, she said, “because I was Mexican,” and she described her childhood social life as limited: “Aloneness was harmful to my personality. I had almost no social life as a result of being a freak brown child in a white suburban world.”[3] Her father did not discuss race directly, even when the two of them had to ride in the back of city buses in Washington. Yet he chastised her when she tried to eat dinner with a Black maid in the kitchen. She also recalled being “ashamed of father talking Spanish, but knowing I should learn it.” Years later, going through boxes of her father’s papers, she found almost no trace of his Mexican past: “It’s as though that didn’t exist.”[4] Of her mother, who died some years later, she wrote: “Few people love life more than she did.”[5]
Marissa: Martinez was also, by most accounts, an unusually driven child. By age nine she was writing, editing, and laying out a family newsletter called “The Daily News.” At sixteen, she won second prize and seventy-five dollars in a national essay contest for elementary and secondary students. She played competitive tennis, rode horses, and became a capable bridge player. At sixteen she also wrote a private manifesto describing what she called her “sacred duty” to “destroy hatred and prejudice,” and, alongside her more comfortable home life, worked a series of ordinary jobs: clerk-typist at an insurance company, waitress at an ice-cream store, and copy girl at the Washington Post.[6]
Elizabeth: By the summer before she left for college she had already decided she wanted to earn her living as a writer. She entered Swarthmore College as its first Latina student. She wrote for and later became associate editor of the student newspaper, The Phoenix, where she was known for quirky headlines. During World War II she followed the news of the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and formed a lasting friendship with a fellow student and refugee, the future economist Andre Gunder Frank, who like her had grown up without feeling fully settled anywhere. After reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk for a class paper, she wrote: “Only the blindest of persons could refrain from crying aloud with the injustice of racial relationships.”[7] But she had grown up thinking about injustice. In a reminisce of her father she said, “My father’s education in seeing the Mexican Revolution, which he saw as a young man in Mexico, was unmistakable, an unmistakable event, because he was so happy and positive about the Zapatistas when they came into Mexico City and he saw them come in, hundreds of campesinos in their white clothes on horses. And then when the Marines, the U.S. Marines, bombed Vera Cruz, trying to stop the [Mexican] Revolution [of 1910], [my father denounced that in no uncertain terms]. Anyway, so I grew up with a sort of anti-imperialist consciousness, and pro–Latin American consciousness.”[8]
Marissa: After graduating from Swarthmore with honors in history and Spanish in 1946, Martínez moved to New York City in pursuit of a career in the publishing world. She adopted her mother’s middle name and became, professionally, Elizabeth Sutherland, a name that allowed her to move more easily through an industry largely dominated by white men.
Elizabeth: Her career moved quickly, aided by contacts from Swarthmore that opened institutional doors not typically available to Latinas at the time. She worked as a clerk, translator, and researcher at the United Nations from 1946 to 1954, where she helped her boss “feed information to the Third World delegates with which they could embarrass the colonial powers.”[9] She then worked as an administrative assistant to photographer Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art from 1957 to 1958, as an editor at Simon & Schuster beginning in 1958, and later as Books and Arts Editor at The Nation in 1964. At Simon and Schuster, only two years into the job, she was given responsibility for editing Ingmar Bergman’s Four Screenplays. Also, while working full-time at Simon & Schuster, she reviewed films for Horizon and Film Quarterly, reported on a visit to Cuba for The Nation and the Manchester Guardian, reported for Evergreen Review on a trip to Moscow to interview Soviet poets, spearheaded the publication of a book on the Civil Rights Movement, wrote a column for the National Guardian about her own appearance before HUAC, and wrote a letter to the New York Times criticizing its coverage of Soviet theater — all while also doing political work with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and Friends of SNCC, and endorsing Robert Williams’s advocacy of armed self-defense in North Carolina’s Black communities. So, uh, basically she was WORKING.
Marissa: Her personal life during these years included two marriages that each ended within the decade: first to Leonard Berman, and then, in 1952, to the writer Hans Koning. Koning, the grandson of a socialist poet, had fled occupied Holland during the war and joined the Dutch resistance before immigrating to the United States in 1951; his father David had been murdered at Mauthausen. He later was a founder of Resist, the direct-action, anti-draft movement, during the Vietnam War. Martinez quit her UN job and moved to Mexico for several months with Koning so he could finish the first of what would become forty published books. That marriage produced her daughter, Tessa, and ended after seven years.
Marissa: Martinez traveled to Cuba in 1959, right after Batista was overthrown, and again in 1961, to attend the National Congress of Cuban Writers and Artists. “When Cuba declared itself socialist,” she said afterward, “so did I.” The declaration drew the attention of the FBI, which flagged her for association with “far leftist groups,” and she was later subpoenaed by a House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subcommittee investigating pro-Cuban activity in the United States.[10] A 1962 Moscow trip placed her in a packed auditorium listening to Soviet poets “read between the official lines,” as she put it. She described the country afterward as “this huge nutsy country with its bloodstained past and wide-open future, where books of poetry sell out 100,000 copies in a few weeks and poets are as famous as spacemen.”[11]
Elizabeth: During the early 1960s it seems like Martinez was everywhere. She moved between distinct social worlds that included literary and artistic figures including Beat poets Diane Di Parma and Allen Ginsberg and people like Timothy Leary on one side, and the world of upwardly mobile diplomats and publishing colleagues on the other. Her circle of friendships with a wild variety of radical and artistic people also shaped own romantic history. She said, “I had more wondrous and disastrous relationships than you can count. With poets, artists, revolutionaries, junkies, and various combinations thereof.”[12]
Marissa: Tony Platt describes her, in this period, as “a woman in a world dominated by men,” noting that as someone who visibly read as Mexican in the eyes of New York’s mostly white, male literary establishment, she had to work harder than her peers to be taken seriously.[13] Nevertheless, Martinez’s personal and professional relationships helped her forge networks that followed her into civil rights activism, particularly when she began raising money and building institutional support for the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
Elizabeth: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had formed in 1960 as a communications body for the sit-in campaigns taking place across the South, mainly by young college student activists. SNCC grew into a recognized political organization in 1961 after Diane Nash organized a continuation of the Freedom Rides once the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) withdrew from them under violent pressure. Freedom Rides were bus rides intended to test whether interstate bus terminals across the South were actually complying with federal desegregation law. White and Black people would get on buses in the North and travel South. Many of the freedom riders were beaten and harassed and buses were burned when they stopped at some southern bus terminals. By 1963, SNCC had committed to a voter-registration drive in Mississippi, working alongside CORE, the NAACP, and the Urban Coalition in a state that resisted integration more forcefully than any other in the South, countering it with anti-integration statutes and extreme violence. Side note: Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi is a great, first-person narrative about the Movement in Mississippi during this time. We did a podcast about Anne Moody, which will be linked in the show notes.
Marissa: The voter registration effort ran alongside an effort to build a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that could challenge the all-white regular state party’s claim to represent Mississippi Democrats. By the fall of 1963, the movement staged an unofficial “Freedom Vote” in which eighty thousand disenfranchised Black Mississippians cast ballots for Black and white candidates. Martinez had been active with Friends of SNCC in New York City since 1962, using her publishing contacts to raise funds in New York circles most SNCC organizers had no access to. After the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September 1963, she left her position at The Nation to become a worker in the Movement full time. In 1964 she represented SNCC in a Wall Street coalition that protested Chase Manhattan Bank’s financial ties to South Africa’s apartheid government.
Elizabeth: She traveled to Mississippi and participated in Freedom Summer the same year. Her and another organizer Maria Varela were, according to Martinez, were the only Latinas in the project.[14] Freedom Summer of 1964 proved dangerous in the ways organizers had anticipated. Over the course of the summer, three volunteers were killed, four shot and wounded, fifty-two beaten, and two hundred fifty arrested. Additionally, thirteen Black churches were burned to the ground and seventeen more buildings damaged by fire or bombing, and ten automobiles were destroyed. A hundred and thirty-six FBI agents were sent to Mississippi that summer, but instructed to observe rather than intervene, and the Justice Department maintained it lacked legal authority to act. A group of Harvard law professors disputed the FBI’s claim that same summer in what came to be known as the Howe Memo, arguing the government had both legal authority under federal statute and precedent from prior interventions in Mississippi, Little Rock, and Alabama. The Justice Department did not interfere simply because it did not want to. The movie Mississippi Burning is loosely based on Freedom Summer, but the movie has white savior vibes because it glorifies the FBI. Still, it does give you an idea of the real violence that was Black Mississippian’s everyday reality.
Marissa: Martinez used her publishing connections directly on the movement’s behalf. In 1964 she persuaded Simon and Schuster to publish The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, a photographic history of SNCC’s early years with images by Danny Lyon, an introduction by Lorraine Hansberry, and text Martinez herself acquired and edited, but she was not given formal credit at publication. She arranged for all royalties from the book to go to SNCC.The following year she edited Letters from Mississippi, a collection of letters written home by Freedom Summer volunteers.
Marissa: Racial tensions within SNCC intensified during the Freedom Summer project. There was resentment among veteran Black SNCC staff toward the white volunteers because, unlike Black staff, white volunteers could just go back to their regular and safe lives after the summer. The white volunteer Sally Belfrage, in her own account of the project, wrote: “Black and white had to fight together in the movement, but the fight was as much against its own internal racism as the outer world’s.”[15]
Elizabeth: Freedom Summer’s organizing built toward the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in August 1964, where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), by then representing roughly a hundred thousand Black and white Mississippians, sought to be seated in place of the state’s regular segregationist delegation. Joseph Rauh, the MFDP’s lawyer and a member of the convention’s Credentials Committee, later said he had expected both delegations to be seated, reasoning that Lyndon Johnson could not afford to alienate either Southern or Northern Democrats, and citing a similar compromise reached over competing Texas delegations at the 1948 convention. (1948 was the same year the Dixiecrats staged a coup at the Democratic National Convention.) You might want to listen to Sarah’s recent episode about white women creating and defending Jim Crow segregation for more context on these kinds of debates.
Marissa: The regular Mississippi Democratic Party’s own platform, adopted in 1960, gives some sense of what the MFDP was contesting: it condemned the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, opposed anti-poll-tax measures, and stated plainly, “We believe in segregation of the races and are unalterably opposed to the repeal or modification of the segregation laws of this state.”
Elizabeth: The party would go on to back Barry Goldwater over Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. Bob Moses, SNCC’s leader in Mississippi, was more pessimistic about the MFDP’s chances at the convention than Rauh. Under pressure from Johnson, the Credentials Committee ultimately offered a compromise: seating for regular Mississippi delegates who took a loyalty oath, two at-large seats for the MFDP, and assurances against seating segregated delegations in the future. The regular Mississippi delegation walked out rather than take the oath and the MFDP rejected the compromise. The rejection was a turning point for SNCC, whose leadership concluded afterward that the federal government and its mainstream liberal allies could not be relied upon, and set the stage for the organization’s shift toward Black Power over the following two years.
Marissa: In January 1965 Jim Forman asked Martinez to become director of SNCC’s New York office, succeeding Marion Barry, who had moved on to organizing work in Washington, D.C. Under Martinez’s direction, the office became the source of as much as three-quarters of SNCC’s national operating budget.
Elizabeth: By 1966, SNCC’s leadership had moved toward a position that limited the role of white members within the organization. Martinez later described the period as one in which SNCC had “an identity crisis” and decided it “should be an all-black organization.”[16]
Marissa: In a Berkeley speech that year, Stokely Carmichael stated the position directly: “We cannot have white people working in the black community. Liberal whites want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley.” SNCC’s formal position, articulated in May 1966, called for white organizers to work in white communities and Black organizers in Black ones. Martinez did not believe SNCC was seriously invested in the former, writing that “the decision in effect signaled: get out.” “No one white-baited me to my face,” she said later, “but to most of the SNCC staff she was classified as white.”[17] Publicly, she supported the position that Black leadership was necessary. Privately, she wrote to a fellow staff member: “I don’t think that whites should be forced out by being made so miserable that they resign or hang on unable to function. They aren’t colonial powers, they’re Movement people.”[18]
Elizabeth: In June 1967, she sent a paper titled “Black, White, and Tan” to SNCC’s Atlanta headquarters, signing it, for the first time within the organization, as Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, using her legal surname rather than the professional name she had used since the 1940s. “That’s my full name up there,” she wrote at the time.[19] “Black, White, and Tan” pushed back against the Black/white binary and asked readers to consider what “unpredictable byproducts” might be produced from revolution. Scholar Natalie Havlin argues this memo “records the emergence of a Chicana feminist and internationalist analysis from within the U.S. black liberation movement.”[20] Martinez argued she had developed a “Latin consciousness” growing up in a mixed-race household in a primarily white world, and a “Third World consciousness” after “working at the U.N. on African colonialism.” She urged her SNCC counterparts to therefore learn about the “Latin consciousness, the Mexican consciousness” in order to develop a revolutionary humanism.”[21] Martinez left SNCC shortly thereafter. However, she did not, by her own account, distance herself from SNCC’s broader politics during this period. Later that year she returned to Cuba with Carmichael and two other SNCC representatives to meet with a gathering of Latin American revolutionaries, describing their shared position as opposition to “the exploitation of black people in the United States” and to the exploitation of “the Third World by the United States” more broadly.[22]
Marissa: Martinez’s contributions from this period were not always publicly credited. Her name does not appear on The Movement, the 1964 book she had acquired and edited for Simon and Schuster, where Lorraine Hansberry is credited for the introduction and Danny Lyon and Roy DeCarava for their photographs. She was similarly uncredited for editing work on Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s 1967 Black Power, one chapter of which was so bad she said she had to “turn into prose.”[23] She later received more direct acknowledgment for her editing work with Jim Forman on his 1972 memoir The Making of Black Revolutionaries, and Forman later credited her with pressing him to address the importance of “women’s liberation” in his account of the movement.
Elizabeth: In the period immediately following her departure from SNCC, Martinez became involved with the radical feminist movement then forming in New York City. In 1968 she joined the New York Radical Women collective, which included Joan Brown and Shulamith Firestone, and co-wrote an essay with Carol Hanisch for the first issue of Notes from the First Year, a foundational text of the era’s radical feminist theory, priced fifty cents for women and a dollar for men. The essay, “Women Unite–We Have Nothing to Lose But Our Men,” was structured as a series of answers to common objections to the movement. Its first rebuttal countered the idea that women’s liberation was not as immediately important as Black liberation or ending the war in Vietnam, arguing that the capitalist system has institutionalized male supremacy.” The essay ran directly after the initial draft of Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Asked whether women don’t naturally want to be housewives, the essay answered: “Anyone who thinks she feels good as she surveys her kitchen after washing the 146,789th batch of sparkling dishes isn’t being ‘natural’; she’s literally lost her mind.”[24]
Marissa: Martínez developed a direct critical analysis of the connection between racism and sexism, the two political commitments she had come to hold by that point. She recalled Shulamith Firestone describing an orthodox Jewish school where boys prayed, “Thank you, Lord, for not making me a woman.”[25] However, the white women’s movement was not addressing the intersection of racism and misogyny. For example, she was extremely distressed when she arrived at a women’s group meeting the night MLK was assassinated. She said, “So I go to that meeting, I am not prepared to talk about anything except that assassination. And I get there: nobody’s even talking about it! I said, What the shit is this? I’m outta here! I mean, this is just too white for me.”[26]
Marissa: Her writing in this period continued to fold together questions of race, gender, and sexuality. In a poem from this period she wrote of “our women/ in postures of maternity, sadness, devotion/ tears for the lost husband or son/ our women, nothing but shadows/ reflections of someone else’s existence/ BASTA!”[27] She wrote a piece for Mademoiselle in 1967, titled “…because he was black and I was white,” that examined interracial relationships within the movement through interviews with other women activists. This was a topic that was widely discussed privately, but rarely written about directly. Two years later, her book The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba, which drew on her earlier reporting trips to Cuba, was read by a number of activists including Angela Davis, who later praised its “anti-imperialist perspective” and “careful eye.” [28]
Elizabeth: Martinez’s move toward the growing Chicano movement had precedent in her earlier organizing. While still working in New York for SNCC, she had arranged the first New York screening of Salt of the Earth, a film about a Mexican American miners’ strike. She had also served on a SNCC committee supporting Cesar Chavez’s Delano grape pickers’ strike, writing in the Village Voice in 1966 that the image of “the lazy Mexican always asleep under his sombrero has received its deathblow.”[29]
Marissa: The Chicano Movement emerged in the mid-to-late 1960s as a broad civil rights and cultural pride movement among Mexican Americans across the United States, particularly concentrated in California, Texas, and the Southwest. It grew out of decades of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and political representation, and it drew energy from the broader climate of the era’s civil rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements.
Elizabeth: The movement had several interlocking strands. In the fields of California, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized farmworkers through the United Farm Workers, fighting for labor rights and fair wages. Also in California, Flores and Ramona Morín founded the League of Mexican-American Women (LMAW) to increase women’s political representation. In New Mexico, Reies López Tijerina led a movement seeking to reclaim territory taken from Mexican American communities after the Mexican American War. Tijerina preferred the term Indo Hispano (just to give you more food for thought about naming conventions that I mentioned earlier). Also I discuss the issue of Anglo confiscation of land after the Mexican American war in one of our older episodes about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, linked in the show notes. In Texas, José Ángel Gutiérrez helped found La Raza Unida Party to build independent Mexican American political power. Young people were extremely important to the movement. The Brown Berets formed in 1967 in East Los Angeles, grew out of a youth group called Young Citizens for Community Action, founded by David Sánchez and other young activists. As the group grew more organized and militant, members adopted brown berets as a uniform, explicitly modeling themselves on the Black Panther Party and on revolutionary movements in Latin America. The Brown Berets described themselves as a paramilitary, community-defense organization dedicated to protecting Chicano communities, particularly against police brutality. Chapters spread rapidly to cities across California, Texas, Colorado, and beyond, and at their peak they had chapters nationwide.
Marissa: In 1968, Martinez moved to New Mexico, drawn by the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a land-grant organization led by Reies López Tijerina whose armed takeover of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse had drawn national attention. She arrived, by her own description, “totally ignorant of the Southwest, almost totally ignorant of Chicano culture and life.” But, upon seeing the Sangre de Cristo mountain range for the first time, she knew she was home.[30] After feeling unlike her true self on the East coast, she was looking for a place where she could be Betita, and that would be enough.
Elizabeth: Working with Movement attorney Beverly Axelrod, she co-founded a bilingual newspaper, El Grito del Norte, which was initially conceived as a vehicle for the Alianza’s politics. The paper didn’t stay aligned with Tijerina’s nationalism for long. El Grito del Norte drifted toward an increasingly left, internationalist editorial position, covering Vietnam, Cuba, and China and sending its own reporters to each. Martínez herself became the first Chicano organizer to visit North Vietnam, in 1970. Also, her insistence on women running significant parts of the newspaper’s operation put her at odds with what she and others described as the Alianza’s “old-style chauvinism.”[31]
Marissa: The Chicano Movement, like many liberation movements of its era, organized around cultural nationalism such as pride in heritage, family, and community solidarity against Anglo-American discrimination. But this nationalism was often articulated through a masculine lens. Movement rhetoric celebrated “Chicanismo” and carnalismo (brotherhood) in ways that centered male leadership, and leadership positions across the Brown Berets, the UFW, and La Raza Unida Party were overwhelmingly held by men.
Elizabeth: Chicanas often found themselves relegated to administrative work, cooking, and logistics, rather than shaping political strategy. Women who raised concerns about sexism were sometimes accused of disloyalty to La Causa or of importing a “white, middle-class” agenda that threatened to divide or undermine the movement. Martínez directly confronted this framing in her influential 1972 essay “La Chicana.” She argued 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,” and that mainstream feminism, having “rejected traditional family,” missed something essential. For Chicanas, “the family has been a source of unity and our major defense against the oppressor.”[32] Her critique argued that any feminism relevant to Chicanas had to be built from their own conditions. Out of this tension in the Chicano movement, a distinct Chicana feminist movement took shape in the early-to-mid 1970s. Chicana activists, many deeply involved in the Brown Berets and other student groups and Movement organizations, argued that the fight against racial and economic oppression could not be separated from the fight against sexism.
Marissa: Martínez gave this argument its sharpest early articulation, writing that “the Chicana suffers from a triple oppression. She is oppressed by the forces of racism, imperialism and sexism.” She traced this condition historically, locating its roots in the earliest colonial encounter: “Our roots lie in the act of rape: the rape of women, the rape of an entire continent and its people.” And she was clear that this triple oppression could not be disaggregated, whereas the mainstream U.S. women’s 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.”[33]
Elizabeth: She also grounded her analysis in class and labor, describing how a working-class Chicana’s life was shaped from childhood: if she did agricultural work, “she must go to work in the fields at an early age, along with other members of the family, and move with them around the country as they search for work,” and even then, working “16 hours a day to support her children,” she would “still be viewed as a sexual object rather than a human being” rather than as “a fellow worker and fellow victim of oppression.” She argued for solidarity across gender lines within the movement itself: “we will not win our liberation struggle unless the women move together with the men rather than against them,” and that Chicanas “must work to convince the men that our struggle will become stronger if women are not limited to a few, special roles.” She placed real responsibility on Chicano men to join this fight, writing that enlightened men should help combat sexism since “it should not be our battle alone” while also naming how the oppressor exploited machismo itself, “appealing to a Chicano’s sense of supposed manhood” to serve its own ends, whether sending men to war or letting them “beat and mistreat women, who thus serve as targets for a frustration that might otherwise become revolutionary.”[34]
Marissa: Rather than accept that feminism was foreign to Chicano culture, Martínez insisted the culture itself needed reexamining: “we need to reexamine and redefine our culture,” rejecting the notion that femininity in La Raza had “always meant: weak, passive, delicate looking,” and reclaiming a deeper tradition in which “the woman of La Raza is traditionally a fighter and revolutionary.”[35]
Elizabeth: This intellectual work had organizational counterparts. The 1971 Chicana Conference in Houston, sometimes called the first national Chicana feminist conference, drew hundreds of women to discuss reproductive rights, childcare, and marginalization within the broader movement. There were publications like Encuentro Femeniland organizations like Comisión Femenil Mexicana organized around issues including forced sterilization of Mexican American women and welfare rights. Within the Brown Berets specifically, women who felt sidelined despite their organizing labor broke off in 1970 to form Las Adelitas de Aztlán, named after the female soldiers of the Mexican Revolution.
Marissa: Martinez’s essay, “Colonized Women: The Chicana,” in Robin Morgan’s 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, a book that became widely read within the broader feminist movement, introduced many readers outside Chicano circles to the specific position of Chicanas within it. In that essay and elsewhere, she described what she called “the super-macho” as someone “haunted by the need to prove his manhood,” locating machismo as a structure of control comparable to the racial hierarchies she had spent the previous decade organizing against. She and Hanisch had made a related argument even earlier, writing in their 1968 “Women of the World Unite,” that the patriarchy’s knee-jerk reaction to calling feminists lesbians, regardless of their sexual orientation, was an example of bruised manhood. They wrote, “queer-baiting is no different from red-baiting.”[36] Martínez returned to this question of sexuality as powerdecades later, including in a 1990 letter criticizing the New York Times Book Review for overlooking the work of Chicana lesbian writers.
Elizabeth: When El Grito del Norte folded in 1973, Martínez helped found the Chicano Communications Center in Albuquerque, combining a Marxist study group with grassroots organizing. Leading a demonstration at the Albuquerque courthouse, she was described by the activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz as exuding “an air of serene authority that I had rarely seen in a woman.”[37] She left New Mexico in 1974 and spent the following decade in the San Francisco Bay Area as a member of the Democratic Workers Party (DWP), a Leninist organization led by women, editing and designing the party’s newspaper. She ran for governor of California in 1982 on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
Marissa: In 1997, she co-founded the Institute for MultiRacial Justice in San Francisco with Phil Hutchings, SNCC’s last chairman, along with the publications CrossRoads magazine and War Times, whose stated mission was to “help build alliances among peoples of color and combat our divisions.” In 2000, the National Association of Chicano/Chicana Studies named her its “scholar of the year,” and she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Swarthmore.
Elizabeth: Her written work from this period forms the core of her broader reputation. In 1976, for the U.S. bicentennial, she published 450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, a bilingual photographic history combining photographs, paintings, drawings, and political cartoons to trace Mestizo history in the Americas. She revised it in 1991–92, retitling it 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, and the book later formed the basis for a documentary, ¡Viva la Causa! In 2008, she published a separate and more ambitious successor, 500 Years of Chicana Women’s History, containing close to nine hundred images and bilingual text tracing the specific history of Chicana and Mexican-American women, from pre-Columbian Mexico through profiles of contemporary labor leaders, artists, and organizers. Her political writings from across this period were later compiled in a separate volume, De Colores Means All of Us. Angela Davis, writing a foreword to that collection of Martínez’s political essays, described her body of work as “one of the most important living histories of progressive activism in the contemporary era.”
Marissa: In 2012, she published, with Matt Meyer and Mandy Carter, We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America, an anthology drawing on a speech she had given to the War Resisters League in New York in 2004, in which she criticized the antiwar movement for treating racism as “a separate, secondary issue.” Tony Platt, who visited her regularly in her later years, described her continuing to attend protests and distribute leaflets into the 1990s and 2000s, even as most of her contemporaries from the 1960s had scaled back their activism.
Elizabeth: Elizabeth Betita Martínez died in San Francisco on June 29, 2021, at the age of ninety-five. She described her own life as having spanned “five international wars, six social movements, and seven attempts to build socialism” around the world, and said, “There is no separating my life from history.”[38] Which, to me, mirrors historian Stephen Pitti’s assertion that I mentioned at the top of the episode. Across five decades, Martínez’s contribution to Chicana feminism rested on a consistent argument: that race and gender could not be organized against separately; that Chicana history demanded its own sustained documentation, rather than a subordinate place inside either the Chicano movement’s history or mainstream feminism’s; and that dismantling hierarchies of power required a hemispheric understanding of how those forces of oppression operate.
Thanks for listening!
Reading
“Elizabeth (Betita Martinez) Sutherland,” The SNCC Digital Gateway, https://snccdigital.org/people/elizabeth-betita-martinez-sutherland/
Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, interviewed by Loretta Ross, March 3, 2006 and August 6, 2003, https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/MartinezBetita.pdf
“Notes From the First Year,” 1968, https://www.cliohistory.org/fileadmin/files/click/Classroom/Jeannette_Rankin_Brigade/Notes_from_the_First_Year.pdf
Haylin, Natalie.“‘To Live a Humanity under the Skin’: Revolutionary Love and Third World Praxis in 1970s Chicana Feminism, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3/4, (2015):78-97.
Platt, Tony. “The Heart Just Insists: In the Struggle with Elizabeth “Betita” Sutherland Martínez,” Social Justice, Vol. 39, No. 2/3 (2012):26-48.
McClymer, John F., ed. Mississippi Freedom Summer, University of Wisconsin (2010).
Reyes, Kathryn Blackmer. “Elizabeth Sutherland / Elizabeth “Betita” Sutherland Martínez Bibliography, 1960—2013,” Social Justice, Vol. 39, No ⅔ (2012): 12-25.
Further Listening:
Rise of the Right in the Cold War
[1] “Elizabeth (Betita Martinez) Sutherland,” The SNCC Digital Gateway, https://snccdigital.org/people/elizabeth-betita-martinez-sutherland/.
[2] Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, interviewed by Loretta Ross, March 3, 2006 and August 6, 2003, tape 1, (hereafter Martinez interview).
[3] Tony Platt, “The Heart Just Insists: In the Struggle with Elizabeth “Betita” Sutherland Martínez,” Social Justice, Vol. 39, No. 2/3 (2012):28.
[4] Platt, 28.
[5] Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, March 27, 2010, Civil Rights Movement Veterans Website, https://www.crmvet.org/nars/stor/s_betita.htm.
[6] Platt, 28-29.
[7] Platt, 29.
[8] Martinez interview, tape 1.
[9] Platt, 29.
[10] Platt, 33.
[11] Platt, 32.
[12] Platt, 31.
[13] Platt, 31.
[14] Martinez interview, tape 2.
[15] John F. McClymer, ed., Mississippi Freedom Summer, University of Wisconsin (2010),193.
[16] Platt, 35.
[17] Platt, 35.
[18] Platt, 35.
[19] Platt, 38.
[20] Natalie Havlin, “To Live a Humanity under the Skin”: Revolutionary Love and Third World Praxis in 1970s Chicana Feminism,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3/4, (2015): 80.
[21] Havlin, 80-81, quoting Martinez, “Black, White, and Tan.”
[22] The SNCC Digital Gateway.
[23] Platt, 34.
[24] Elizabeth Sutherland and Carol Hanisch, “Women of the World Unite– We Have Nothing to Lose But Our Men,” Notes from the First Year, June 1968, 14.
[25] Platt, 36.
[26] Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, interviewed by Loretta Ross, March 3, 2006, tape 1.
[27] Platt, 36.
[28] Platt, 35.
[29] Platt, 37.
[30] Platt, 30.
[32] Martinez, “La Chicana,” Ideal, September 5-20, 1972: pp. 1-2. Anthologized in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings.
[33] Martinez, “La Chicana.”
[34] Martinez, “La Chicana.”
[35] Martinez, “La Chicana.”
[36] Sutherland and Hanisch, “Women of the World Unite,” 16.
[37] Platt, 37.
[38] Platt, 36.
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