All power to the people: A comparative history of Third World radicalism in San Francisco, 1968--1974

This project critically and comparatively explores the urban politics emergent within San Francisco's Black, Latina/o, Native American, and Asian American communities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through an investigation of the Third World Strike at San Francisco State College and the community activism of “Los Siete de La Raza” in the Mission District, this study excavates and examines the material and ideological linkages that existed between diverse communities of color, highlighting the dynamic cultural and political identities that were forged in the process of struggle. I detail how activists of color articulated a radical Third World identity that expressed a transformative set of politics and that enabled them to view their separate histories and circumstances as fundamentally related. Further, I argue it addressed multiple oppressions in both local and global contexts, thereby opening up their anti-racist praxis to incorporate a more explicitly internationalist, working class, and feminist orientation. The existence of this over-looked “oppositional consciousness” challenges both conventional studies of the Sixties and contemporary racial politics.;All Power to the People illuminates a unique political and cultural formation obscured by studies that focus exclusively on one racial group or social movement. It bridges previously separate histories in an effort to complicate notions of race, identity, and political activism. However, as it explores the dynamic contours of a polycentric Third World social movement in the Bay Area, this study also forces us to reconsider our basic understanding of the specific Black, Red, Yellow, and Chicana/o Power movements. What does it mean, for instance, that Richard Aoki, a Japanese American from West Oakland, served as a Field Marshall of the Black Panther Party? How does the recognition that Los Siete de La Raza was a pan-Latino organization compel us to rethink the Chicana/o Movement and the politics of nationalism? The boundaries separating these different struggles, I argue, were extremely porous and a profound cross-fertilization of both ideas and people took place that has (as yet) not been acknowledged. With economic globalization and demographic shifts currently transforming the country (and California, in particular), I argue it is imperative to remember and re-examine Third World political formations of an earlier period.