“A Social Movement in Fact”: La Raza and El Plan de Delano

ABSTRACT

This essay revisits the rhetoric of El Plan de Delano, a pivotal document in the farm workers movement and the broader Chican@ movement. Composed and circulated during their peregrinación from Delano to Sacramento, California in 1966, the manifesto stretched the topography of race in the 1960s, both geographically and bodily, as it publicized the farm workers’ struggle during their wage-strike. My reading of the visual and verbal rhetorics of the pamphlet of El Plan de Delano surfaces race as an energizing topos. I show how El Plan de Delano (re)fashioned a racial identity for farm workers and parlayed that identity in its appeals.

KEYWORDS:

• Chican@ movement
• farm workers
• la raza
• Plan de Delano
• racial imperative

Acknowledgments

I thank Drs. Josue David Cisneros, Ned O'Gorman, John M. Murphy, Cara A. Finnegan, and Rolando Romero for their invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this essay. I also thank Dr. Jacqueline Rhodes for editorial guidance, as well as the two anonymous reviewers that helped substantially to improve this essay.

Notes

¹ In the spirit of Wanzer-Serrano’s proposal to “Otherwise” rhetoric (“Delinking Rhetoric” 653–54), I will be using Spanish words, as well as italicizing them and accenting them unless they are unitalicized or unaccented in their original sources. Although Holling and Calafell have tried to lessen “difference” by leaving Spanish unitalicized (and for good reason), italics function as a way to distinguish historical material from my own use of Spanish terms (see note 2 in Holling and Calafell, “Identities on Stage and Staging Identities”).

² Throughout the essay, I will refer to the document as El Plan de Delano or The Plan of Delano, as well as either el/El Plan or the Plan. However, when referring to the genre of which El Plan de Delano is a part, I will use unitalicized forms (i.e., Plan).

³ I use the “Chican@” designation to refer to the historical Chican@ movement phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s. Although some scholars have urged for the more inclusive term “Chicanx,” I take this term to be of better use to refer to contemporary expressions of identity (Blackwell and McCaughan). As scholars have increasingly recognized the pervasive presence of the Chicana movement that operated alongside the prominent Chicano variation of the movement, I am persuaded by Holling and Calafell’s arguments concerning the -@ suffix; namely, that it simultaneously infuses inclusivity and subverts conventional gender binaries (Holling and Calafell, “Introduction” 16).

⁴ Luis León relies on a reproduction by the Farm Worker Documentation Project (found at https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/essays/…/Plan%20of%20Delano.pdf), which includes commentary by Luis Valdez (Luís D. León, “Cesar Chavez in American Religious Politics” note 53). Similarly, Hammerback and Jensen’s essay on the “ethnic legacies” empowering the suasiveness of El Plan de Delano acknowledges that it was published in El Malcriado and in a photobook published later that same year—although they record that its publication in El Macriado was in 1977 and not in 1966 (see note 61 of their essay). Their analysis, however, depends on Valdez and Steiner’s reproduction, which includes only the text of the Plan and none of its visuals (Hammerback and Jensen, note 62). Although scholars acknowledge English and Spanish translations, none have attended to the translations to assess their rhetorical significance. One important note is that the English version was intended to reach younger Mexican American audiences (Adair 1).