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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/us/elizabeth-martinez-voice-of-the-chicana-movement-dies-at-95.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/us/elizabeth-martinez-voice-of-the-chicana-movement-dies-at-95.html</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Elizabeth Martínez, Voice of the Chicana Movement, Dies at 95</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Katharine Q. Seelye - June 29, 2021<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><p id="gmail-article-summary">Through
her writings, she inspired, provoked, educated, strategized, organized
and built cross-racial and cross-ethnic alliances, all in pursuit of
social justice.</p><div><div width="600px" height="410px"><span></span></div><div><div><span><img alt="Elizabeth Martínez in an undated photo. Her career took her from jobs at the U.N. and in New York publishing to the Southwest and then to San Francisco, driven by a passion for politics and social justice." src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/02/04/obituaries/00Martinez1/merlin_183238986_b7a76566-73df-4e32-8401-5d5a07c1591a-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="494" height="338"></span></div><span><span>Credit...</span><span><span>Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries</span></span></span></div></div><p><span>June 29, 2021</span><span>Updated <span>5:14 p.m. ET</span></span></p><div><p>Elizabeth
Martínez, a feminist, writer and community activist who helped organize
the Chicana movement, which sought to empower people, like her, who
were of Mexican descent and born in the United States, died on Tuesday
in San Francisco. She was 95.</p><p>The cause was vascular dementia, said Tony Platt, a longtime friend.</p><p>Known
as Betita, Ms. Martínez used her literary skills as an editor and
writer to inspire, provoke, educate, strategize, organize and build
cross-ethnic and cross-racial alliances, all in pursuit of social
justice.</p><p>Half Mexican and half Anglo, she struggled for decades
with her identity. As a young professional in Manhattan, she called
herself Liz Sutherland, taking her mother’s Scottish middle name as her
surname and sometimes passing as Anglo.</p><p>Only in middle age, after
she had moved to the Southwest, did she embrace her Mexican heritage. In
an act of self-empowerment, she called herself Chicana, a word
previously considered pejorative. She reclaimed her surname and helped
define an emergent Chicana movement, seeking rights and pride for
people, especially women, who were often exploited in the labor market
and oppressed by Chicano men.</p></div><div><p>In New Mexico in 1968,
Ms. Martínez co-founded a bilingual newspaper, El Grito del Norte (The
Cry of the North), one of the movement’s first newspapers and one of its
most influential. Its initial aim was to fight for Chicano land rights
in New Mexico, but it quickly took on broader struggles involving the
war in Vietnam, socialism in Cuba and feminism around the world.</p><p>She
was among the first to explore how issues of race, class, poverty,
gender and sexuality could be connected under overlapping systems of
oppression, making her a foundational voice for the concept of
intersectionality long before that term came into vogue.</p><p>Born
before the Depression, Ms. Martínez came of age during World War II.
Full of youthful idealism, she wanted to work for world peace after the
war through the newly formed United Nations.</p><p>Her mission, as she summed it up in a manifesto she wrote at 16, was to “destroy hatred and prejudice.”</p><p>In
her 20s she landed a job at the U.N., where she researched colonialism
in Africa. And for a time she led a high-flying life in Manhattan, while
working first at the U.N. Secretariat; then at the Museum of Modern
Art, where she assisted the photographer <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/26/archives/edward-steichen-is-dead-at-93-made-photography-an-a-rt-form-edward.html" title="">Edward Steichen</a>,
the museum’s director of photography; then at Simon & Schuster,
where she was a book editor; and then at The Nation magazine, where she
was books and arts editor.</p></div><div><p>Ms. Martínez attended chic
Fifth Avenue soirees and hobnobbed with artists and writers. She also
wrote film reviews; translated a French novel; traveled to Cuba, where
she declared herself a socialist (and drew the attention of the F.B.I.);
and visited Moscow to interview leading Russian poets.</p><p>“During
this period, Liz had one foot in the world of upwardly mobile diplomats
and the scribbling class, the other in the demimonde of outsiders,
leftists and Lower East Side rebels,” Mr. Platt, a social justice
scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in 2013 in an
issue of the journal Social Justice dedicated to Ms. Martínez.</p><p>For
a few years she managed to straddle the divide. But all along she was
keenly interested in politics and civil rights. Among the books she
brought into print as an editor was “The Movement: Documentary of a
Struggle for Equality” (1964), a pictorial history of the civil rights
movement, with text by the Black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Ms.
Martínez directed the royalties to the civil rights group the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.</p><p>After the <a href="http://movies2.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0915.html" title="">1963 bombing</a> of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., which killed four Black girls, Ms. Martínez joined the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedom-summer" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Freedom Summer</a>
in Mississippi in 1964, registering Black voters. The next year she
edited “Letters From Mississippi,” correspondence from the mostly white
Northern college students who had volunteered in the registration drive.</p><p>By
the mid-1960s, she felt the pull of revolutionary politics. She quit
most of her mainstream paying jobs and gave herself over to left-wing
causes, joining feminist groups and short-lived Marxist organizations.</p><p>Angela
Davis, the counterculture activist and scholar, was an admirer and
wrote the foreword to Ms. Martinez’s book “De Colores Means All of Us”
(1998). She also contributed an essay to that 2013 issue of Social
Justice, noting that Ms. Martínez’s books were touchstones in her own
political development.</p></div><div><p>“From civil rights and Black
liberation to women’s rights and prison abolition,” Professor Davis
wrote, “I can practically narrate the story of my political life using
Betita’s work as anchoring points.”</p></div><div><div><span><img alt="In a book originally published in 1998, Ms. Martinez presented a radical Latina perspective on race, liberation and identity, issues that took on urgency as the Latina community rapidly expanded in the United States." src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/02/08/obituaries/00Martinez2/oakImage-1612823880169-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="329" height="494"></span></div><div></div></div><div><p>Elizabeth
Sutherland Martínez was born on Dec. 12, 1925, in Washington. Her
blue-eyed, American-born mother, Ruth Sutherland (Phillips) Martínez,
taught advanced high school Spanish and was an accomplished pianist and
tennis player. Her father, Manuel Guillermo Martínez, who came to the
United States in 1917 during the Mexican Revolution, worked his way up
from clerk in the Mexican Embassy to professor of Spanish literature at
Georgetown University.</p><p>“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,” Ms.
Martínez once said. She developed what she called an “anti-imperialist
consciousness and pro-Latin American consciousness.”</p><p>Growing up as
an only child in Chevy Chase, Md., a white, middle-class Washington
suburb that was still largely segregated, Ms. Martínez felt isolated and
had almost no social life. The white family next door would not let
their daughter play with her.</p><p>Betita was not Black but something
other, “which was not at all recognized as any part of the whole racial
paradigm,” she said in an <a href="https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/MartinezBetita.pdf" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">interview</a>
for Smith College’s Voices of Feminism oral history project in 2006. “I
always wanted blue eyes, so I knew there was a color issue involved.”</p><p>She
attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and earned a bachelor’s
degree there in history and Spanish in 1946. She was Swarthmore’s first
Latina graduate.</p><p>At 23, she married Leonard Berman; they were divorced in 1952. That same year she married <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/books/18koning.html" title="">Hans Koning</a>,
an author; that marriage also ended in divorce. She and Mr. Koning had a
daughter, Tessa Koning-Martínez, who is her mother’s sole immediate
survivor. Ms. Martínez died in a hospital in San Francisco.</p></div><div><p>After
the Freedom Summer, Ms. Martínez became the coordinator of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee office in New York, in charge of media
and fund-raising. But by the late 1960s, S.N.C.C. wanted only Black
leadership. Because she was viewed as white, or at least not Black, Ms.
Martínez said, she was marginalized, which left her despondent, though
she continued to edit important works, including the civil rights leader
James Forman’s autobiography, “The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A
Personal Account” (1972).</p><p>Having learned much from the Black civil
rights movement, she was spurred by her rejection from <a href="http://S.N.C.C.to">S.N.C.C.to</a> turn
to her Mexican roots.</p><p>“We of Latin America have no need to latch
on to the Black man’s struggle,” she wrote as she moved to New Mexico.
“We are proud of our own struggle.”</p><p>After editing El Grito del
Norte, she helped create the Chicano Communications Center, which used
political street theater, comic books and other forms of grass-roots
media to convey the struggles of traditional New Mexico communities.</p><p>The
center published one of the most significant books Ms. Martínez edited,
“450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures” (1976), later reprinted as<a href="http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/lr/sp001714/500yrs.html" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> “500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures.” </a>Widely
used in schools, it framed this history as a story of resistance,
economic exploitation and labor struggles. She wrote a companion volume,
“500 Years of Chicana Women’s History” (2008), when she was in her 80s.</p><p>To
her sorrow, the Chicano movement floundered. She attributed this to
what she called “its failure to achieve clarity about its goals and
strategy.” But if that movement ebbed, her determination to fight for
social justice only increased, and she moved on again, this time to the
San Francisco Bay Area.</p><p>There she joined the Democratic Workers
Party, which she said she had chosen because it was the only Marxist
party led by a woman (“a white woman, but a very working-class white
woman”).</p></div><div><div width="600px" height="508px"><span></span></div><div><div><p><span></span></p><div><span><img alt="Ms. Martínez in the mid-1980s. “I can practically narrate the story of my political life using Betita’s work as anchoring points,” the activist and scholar Angela Davis wrote." src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/02/12/obituaries/00Martinez3/merlin_183630420_50d59395-4e3a-4af4-9cbf-c5ff2ee8ecf6-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="494" height="418"></span></div></div><span><span>Credit...</span><span>Margaret Randall</span></span></div></div><div><p>She
plunged into community organizing, teaching women’s studies, conducting
anti-racist workshops and mentoring young activists. She even ran for
governor of California in 1982 on the Peace and Freedom Party line. She
also helped found the <a href="http://www.coloursofresistance.org/583/towards-social-justice-elizabeth-betita-martinez-and-the-institute-for-multiracial-justice/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Institute for MultiRacial Justice</a>,
a San Francisco organization that sought to build cross-racial
alliances around issues like police brutality, immigration and
incarceration.</p><p>Most of her papers are at Stanford University, but <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/mm2014085946/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">some relating to S.N.C.C.</a> are at the Library of Congress.</p><p>Ms.
Martinez was lecturing and writing into her 80s and attending
demonstrations until she moved into a residential care facility in San
Francisco in 2012.</p><p>Decades earlier, she and her daughter had been
interviewed for essays in a book called “The Conversation Begins:
Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism” (1996). Balancing
motherhood with full-time activism was never easy, Ms. Martinez said
then.</p><p>But in later life, with her daughter living nearby in San
Francisco, they became especially close. Ms. Martinez added at the end
of her essay, “Who could ask for anything more?”</p></div></div></div>
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