The Five Paths to Power: José Ángel Gutiérrez and the Continuing Work of the Chicana and Chicano Movement, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. May 31, 2026

The Five Paths to Power: José Ángel Gutiérrez and the Continuing Work of the Chicana/o Movement

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 31, 2026

Dr. Jose Angel Gutierrez LEAD Conference Presentation, San Bernardino, 2014 video

An apt quote for today's essay is by the late, great William Faulkner (2011),

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

For those of us who still understand ourselves as part of the Chicana and Chicano Movement like myself—or as heirs to its unfinished struggle—the work of Professor José Ángel Gutiérrez remains indispensable. 

Gutiérrez, a founder of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), a key architect of La Raza Unida Party, and one of the most important political thinkers and organizers of the Movement, has long insisted that social change does not happen through sentiment alone. It requires strategy, organization, memory, courage, and power.

In his important essay, “The Chicano Movement: Paths to Power,” Gutiérrez identifies five major strategies through which Chicanas and Chicanos sought to transform the conditions of their lives: revolt, litigation, protest, electoral work, and coalition/alliance building (Gutiérrez, 2011). These were not abstract categories. They were forged in barrios, schools, courtrooms, fields, streets, city halls, and statehouses. They emerged from communities tired of being ignored, segregated, undereducated, politically marginalized, and treated as foreigners in lands where our people had deep historical roots.

These five paths remain urgently relevant today, as follows:

1. Revolt: Refusing the Terms of Our Subordination

By “revolt,” we should not understand only dramatic rebellion. At its deepest level, revolt is the refusal to accept the legitimacy of an unjust order. It is the moment when a community says: no more.

For the Chicano Movement, revolt meant refusing second-class citizenship. It meant rejecting school systems that punished Spanish-speaking children, political systems that excluded Mexican American voters, and cultural systems that taught our people shame instead of dignity. 

For Gutierrez, revolt was a psychological, cultural, and political awakening. It began when people stopped asking politely for recognition and began asserting their right to exist, speak, organize, and govern.

Today, revolt is still necessary because the conditions of erasure have not disappeared; they have merely changed form. We see it in attacks on Ethnic Studies, anti-DEI legislation, book bans, curriculum censorship, voter suppression, immigrant criminalization, and the ongoing attempt to make Mexican American history seem controversial in the very places where it is foundational.

For Chicanas and Chicanos today, revolt means refusing silence. It means refusing to let others define our history, our language, our children, our communities, or our future. It means recognizing that dignity begins when we stop internalizing the stories told about us and begin telling the truth about ourselves.

2. Litigation: Using the Law Without Worshiping It

The Chicano Movement understood the courts as one terrain of struggle. Litigation challenged discriminatory schooling, voting practices, jury exclusion, employment discrimination, and the denial of language rights. Legal strategies mattered because unjust systems often hide behind the appearance of legality. Court cases can expose contradictions between democratic ideals and institutional practices.

But Gutiérrez’s framework also reminds us that litigation is only one path—never the sole path. The law can be a shield, but rarely is it sufficient by itself. Courts can affirm rights, but communities must organize to make those rights real. Legal victories can be delayed, narrowed, ignored, or reversed when they are not backed by public pressure and organized power.

This lesson is crucial today. As civil rights protections are weakened and universities, schools, and public agencies comply in advance with political intimidation, litigation remains necessary. Communities must challenge unconstitutional policies, discriminatory governance, and violations of academic freedom and equal protection. But legal strategy must be joined to public education, organizing, documentation, and movement-building.

We need lawyers, yes. But we also need witnesses, scholars, students, parents, artists, clergy, workers, and community organizations who can make visible what the law alone may not see.

3. Protest: Making Injustice Public

Protest was central to the Chicano Movement because injustice often survives

Wikipedia

by being normalized. Walkouts, marches, boycotts, rallies, pickets, and public demonstrations made private suffering visible. They turned isolated grievances into collective demands.

The Crystal City walkouts, the East Los Angeles blowouts, the Chicano Moratorium, farmworker marches, and countless local demonstrations taught a powerful lesson: When institutions refuse to listen, people must create a public moral crisis that cannot be ignored.

Protest still matters today because so much harm is bureaucratized. Programs are “consolidated.” Offices are “restructured.” Books are “reviewed.” Faculty lines are “reallocated.” Students are gaslit—told that nothing has been lost even as the histories, departments, programs, and communities that sustained them are dismantled before their very eyes.

Protest interrupts this language of management. It says plainly what official language conceals. It names erasure as erasure. It names intimidation as intimidation. It names political interference as political interference.

For those of us who carry the memory of the Chicana/o Movement, protest is not a performance. It is public pedagogy. It teaches people what is happening, who is responsible, what is at stake, and what collective courage looks like.

4. Electoral Work: Power Must Be Contested Where Decisions Are Made

Gutiérrez’s role in La Raza Unida Party remains one of the great examples of Chicano political imagination. La Raza Unida did not simply ask the major parties to be kinder to Mexican Americans. It challenged the assumption that our communities should remain loyal to political institutions that ignored them.

Electoral work matters because budgets, school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures, and governing boards shape everyday life. Who gets represented? Which schools get funded? Which histories get taught? Which neighborhoods get protected? Which communities get policed? These are political questions.

Today, Chicana/o Movement politics must again take electoral work seriously—not as a substitute for organizing, but as one of its necessary expressions. We need candidates rooted in community, accountable to movement values, and prepared to defend public education, voting rights, labor rights, immigrant rights, academic freedom, bilingual education, and Ethnic Studies.

We also need political education. Voting alone is insufficient if people do not understand the structures that govern their lives. Electoral work must include voter registration, candidate recruitment, policy analysis, community forums, school board engagement, and accountability after elections.

The lesson of Gutiérrez is not simply “run for office.” The lesson is: build independent political power.

5. Coalition and Alliance Building: No One Wins Alone

The Chicano Movement was never as solitary as some histories suggest. It intersected with Black freedom struggles, Indigenous sovereignty movements, labor organizing, antiwar activism, feminist struggles, student movements, and immigrant justice work. Coalition was not always easy, but it was necessary.

Gutiérrez’ fifth path—coalition and alliance building—may be the most urgent today. The forces attacking Chicana/o studies, African American studies, gender studies, immigrant communities, voting rights, labor rights, and public universities are not operating in isolation. They are coordinated. Our response must be coordinated as well.

This means building principled alliances across Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian American, immigrant, LGBTQ+, labor, student, faculty, faith, and community organizations. It means understanding that an attack on one field of knowledge is an attack on all communities whose histories challenge domination. It means recognizing that Ethnic Studies, bilingual education, civil rights, and academic freedom are not “special interests.” They are democratic necessities.

Coalition does not require sameness. It requires clarity, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to confronting systems of power. The Chicana/o Movement teaches us that solidarity is not charity. It is strategy. It is also a moral practice.

Why These Five Paths Matter Now

We are living through a renewed struggle over memory, belonging, and power. Across the country, and especially in Texas, we see efforts to narrow what can be taught, studied, named, funded, or publicly defended. The attack on DEI, Ethnic Studies, bilingual education, immigrant rights, and academic freedom is not accidental. It is part of a larger effort to discipline institutions and communities that have challenged racial hierarchy.

This is why Gutiérrez’ five paths remain so instructive. They remind us that movements need more than outrage. They need multiple strategies operating together.

Revolt gives us the courage to reject injustice.

Litigation gives us tools to challenge it.

Protest gives injustice a public face.

Electoral work contests power where decisions are made.

Coalition building ensures that we do not fight alone.

For those of us who still claim the Chicana and Chicano Movement, the question is not whether the movement is over. The question is whether we are willing to carry its unfinished responsibilities into the present.

To be part of this movement today is not simply to remember the past with pride. It is to defend the conditions that make dignity, knowledge, representation, and self-determination possible. It is to teach our children that they come from people who fought back. It is to insist that our communities are not marginal to democracy; we are central to its unfinished promise.

José Ángel Gutiérrez gave us not only a history, but a strategic vocabulary. His five paths remind us that power itself is not automatically democratic. Communities and movements can organize power toward very different ends. 

As Katherine Stewart’s (2025) analysis of white Christian nationalism makes clear, movements can also build legal, electoral, institutional, and coalitional power in ways that narrow democracy, impose hierarchy, and exclude those who do not conform to their worldview.

That is why Gutiérrez’ framework remains so important. His analysis is not a celebration of power for its own sake. It is a call to build power from below in the service of dignity, equality, self-determination, and democratic life. 

The Chicana/o Movement sought greater justice in schools, fields, workplaces, neighborhoods, universities, and governing institutions. Its struggle was rooted in the lives of working people, students, women and men, families, and communities who had long been exploited, ignored, and told to wait.

These five paths are not romantic slogans. They are demanding forms of work. They require study, discipline, courage, organization, and historical memory. They also require us to ask, again and again: power for whom, and toward what end?

For those of us who still claim the Chicana and Chicano Movement, Gutiérrez' answer remains clear. We build power not to dominate others, but to make freedom, dignity, and justice more possible for all.

Reference

Faulkner, W. (2011). Requiem for a Nun. Vintage.

Gutiérrez, J. Á. (2011). The Chicano Movement: Paths to power. The Social Studies, 102(1), 25–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/00377996.2011.533043

LEADCSUSB. (2014). Keynote address—“Chicano rights movements: Then and now”—Season 5 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7kZCz5p_7I&t=2092s

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing.