The Chicana Movement
The Chicano movement of the 1960s to 1970s revolved around issues that included economic inequality, and institutional racism that were present in America towards people of Mexican birth (Chicana Movidas 1). Throughout the movement, came the realization of the importance of women’s contribution to activism. They were known as Chicanas and worked to transform their society with feminism as their frontier work of the movement.
Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez gave a Third Worldist perspective on Chicano liberation through her work in El Grito Del Norte newspaper. In 1977, she was also one of the Chicana feminists that advocated with white feminists for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (Chicana Movidas 53). She represents a Latina women that challenged the patterns of expected narratives due to living on the East Coast, having access to a privileged education and being able to assimilate to the United States middle class (Chicana Movidas 247). She covered the 1965 Delano, California grape strike for the Village Voice connecting the southern civil rights movement and the new farmworkers movement (Chicana Movidas 258). Her coverage on the strike, introduced César Chávez and Dolores Huerta to her East Coast readers, which strengthened their leadership within the farmworker’s union (Chicana Movidas 258).
El Grito Del Norte
A renown 1973 bilingual newspaper issue called El Grito Del Norte, which was co-founded by Elizabeth Martinez, showing a picture story of the Chicano movement from 1968 to 1973 (Chicana Movidas 8). It stated how “the movement of la Chicana is not a White Middle Class “Women’s Lib” movement but a movement of women for the sake of la Raza (the Race) as a whole…” (El Grito Del Norte).