Maria E. Ramirez is of Chicana, Puerto-Rican, and Apache descent. She attended Chabot College and was involved in its student movement to establish relevant studies for students of color in the late 1960’s. Chicano walkouts at the high school level and college protests reverberated across multiple campuses, serving as a wake-up call to better serve the minority populations on campus. “At Chabot, it was Black and Chicano students demanding our history be taught, hire counselors, and commitment to recruit from our communities. The Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam war, and the Farm Workers struggle were affecting the consciousness of race and justice.”
“Although we were few in numbers on college campuses at that time, when we gathered with administrations, they saw families, not just students; a community basically historically ignored. My mother always supported me as the first in my family to go to college.” Relatives including younger siblings, as well as the Raza students at Cal State Hayward (currently Cal State East Bay), came out to support the protestors and vice versa. Ramirez was first radicalized during a meeting with the newly formed Chicano Student Union where farmworkers came by to address their need for support. “This was my first and strongest reaction to the worthiness of why we stood up for inclusion for our community. They told us about the need to support their strike for better wages, for clean drinking water, bathrooms in the fields, and to end child labor. They also told us they were glad we were in college and wanted us to do well, but not to forget them, those that work the land and sought basic human dignity for their labor.”
“That was the seed for me, that took root in my lifelong commitment to social justice, that gave my life purpose and connection.” Ramirez shares that the first time she was called a “communist” was on the picket line for the Farmworkers Grape Boycott. “Our protests seemed so peaceful compared to what we saw explode at SF state in terms of the violence leveled at students leading the Third World strike there.” To Ramirez, UC Berkeley set the precedent for organizing due to the tight-knit solidarity of the Black, Asian, Chicano, and Native American students of the TWLF. They all recognized the need to put aside “divide and conquer” and align against their common oppressor. “Their vision for Self Determination and a Third World College, centering our voices in the truth-telling of the formation of the United States as an empire, and being in solidarity with the struggles around the world in name of Self Determination was very appealing to me because I wanted to be more globally aware as well. The war centered on the Vietnamese as the enemy, the biggest “Communists” at that time. I wanted to know, understand how and why, and who were the people of Indochina, defeating all foreign occupiers, including the US, especially since we were being labeled Communist threat on the home front.”
“So, I transferred to Berkeley, and I don’t mean I applied for transfer, I didn’t even know how that worked. I just relocated there and got a job. Because TWLF was so student and community-oriented, I was welcomed and involved with community projects that resulted directly from the Strike until I officially transferred. I met Nina Genera and Lea Ybarra at the Vacaville Prison Project. I was present for the opening of Casa Joaquin Murrieta, got to know staff and students, attended marches against ROTC on campus, against the war, and against the invasion of Cambodia; I was teargassed numerous times, I volunteered with Frente de Liberation in the Fruitvale community, I met and worked with Teatro Trieste, and continued to use Teatro to communicate our struggle.”
According to Ramirez, there was a positive energy, “a ‘gusto’ for working for change, Power to the People, uniting in solidarity both locally, nationally and globally. In general, the women that I knew were deeply committed and loved the work and challenges. We weren’t just cooking, we cooked up opportunities to contribute to the struggle. We took on so many organizing tasks with the goal of always bringing along others, opening doors, and pushing so our communities would benefit. If there was a contradiction, it was that it was easy to push for change, for a better life, to serve La familia out there, the big picture, rather than deal with our individual contradictions. How many of us had internalized the hurts, the wounds of being inferiorized, terrorized, perpetuating colonization generationally? But that did change once there were some gains, programs established, priorities shifted and focus opened up to addressing deep internal divisions and the need for healing, decolonizing, and dismantling harmful patriarchy within continues.”
No event sealed the need for external Third World sisterhood in the struggle for Self Determination for Ramirez more than attending and performing at the Indochinese Peace Conference in Vancouver, Canada in 1971, exactly 50 years ago. Along with her now lifelong comadres, Lea Ybarra, and Nina Genera, they formed an all-woman Teatro group to educate on Draft Counseling. This anti-war support was for Chicanos who were over-represented in the armed forces (and in prisons, as the three women witnessed through the Vacaville Prison Project) and under-represented on college campuses. Many of the women had family members who were in Vietnam. “Our hearts and minds were equally affected seeing daily horror of war not only on our soldiers but seeing Vietnamese children, elders, women, young people, shot, bombed, killed, homes and villages, burned, crying, in a land of basically, farm working people, was not lost on us as we watched our TVs. Most notably, back then they showed all the bodies coming home, and the hospitals with wounded and maimed young soldiers. I mention this because this was not done the whole 20 years of the war in Afghanistan; it was purposely kept from the public at home.”
The Indochinese Peace Conference sent an all-women delegation from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to meet with anti-war, women in the U.S, the majority of whom were women of color. “I later learned from a friend, Lee Maracle, that an unrecognized sponsor and support in the making of this conference was the role of First Nations women of Canada. They helped to provide the location, provisions, and hospitality for the 3-day conference, so I am acknowledging this with gratitude.”
“These Indochinese women were physically little, and yet they swept us away with their immense love and humanity, love for their land, their people, against endless foreign occupation, including US imperialism. Their ability to have joy and laughter and yet experience profound wartime traumas including the sharing of a film showing American planes dropping the lethal chemical defoliant, Agent Orange on their lush countryside.
We witnessed its horrific impacts on the land, and the birth defects on their babies, and their warnings to us on its impacts on our soldiers exposed to its deadly toxicity. The long-term effects of cancers, birth defects directly linked to Dioxin (Agent Orange) continue there in Vietnam and in the lives of our Vietnam vets, and their families all these years after the war supposedly ended. That film struck a deep chord in all women there. Seeing environmental war on land and on Mothers and their children and future generations cemented in many of our minds that the biggest purveyor of unspeakable violence in the world at that time came from, as Martin Luther King stated, our own government. Also, and most importantly, these women provided a vivid example of women and Liberation so much more relatable than the middle class, privileged white women lib movement here in the US.”
Ramirez was deeply involved with community issues. She joined the Free Los Siete Organization and moved to the San Francisco Mission District. She became part of an extraordinary community organization that mobilized and shed light on the historical inequities of the criminal justice system towards Black and brown communities. This was exemplified in this particular case: 7 young Latino men charged with the murder of a policeman, all facing the death penalty. The Black Panther Party provided not only their full solidarity but assisted in multiple ways, even providing legal counsel culminating in the acquittal of the 7 young Latino men. Not unlike today’s climate, this was practically unheard of at the time. “So although my education resumed later, and I retired as a community college counselor, I am still involved with the community, across generations, still using the arts, still learning and growing. My learned advice, especially to women, is to prioritize your education and self-care. “Our energy is rebalancing our Earth.”, and still waiting for the implementation of a full out interdisciplinary Third World College at UCB, the proven antidote to academia’s systemic White Supremacy.”
Over the years, while working as a counselor, Ramirez developed her own one-woman storytelling performance using Teatro and has traveled all over the world to perform and share her stories. Most recently, she has performed for the World Indigenous People Conference on Education in Toronto, Canada. In 2019, she was given an alumni award at the Honoring Muxeres in Arts & Performance Latina Luncheon. Ramirez is the author of La Mujer Indigena Her Story, B.C. (Before the Conquest) (1996), La Mujer: Re-Emergence of La Mujer in the Sixth-Sun Era (1997), and wrote the article “Indigenous Roots of Women’s Rights”. Below are some poems Ramirez has written.