Humberto Corona This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. Untitled Document

   www.americanpatrol.com/DIVERSI - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/6/2002   Last Visited: 3/6/2002

   The executive director of Hermandad, at the center of the CBO storm, is Bert Corona, occasionally referred to as Humberto Corona, hailed as a Latino leader, a colleague of Cesar Chavez, an advocate for immigrants, and a friend of Bill Clinton who keeps a residence in Washington.
   ...
   Corona was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1919, and recalls that the high school there was integrated, including its sports teams. "I don't recall any racial tensions that accompanied playing at El Paso High," Corona told his biographer Mario Garcia. Still, some teachers "held racist versions of the Alamo." Though born in the United States, Corona did not think of himself as an American or even a Mexican-American. "We as Mexicans also had a historic and rightful claim to El Paso and the Southwest," he has said.
   
   Corona recounts with delight stories he was told as a child of Pancho Villa's raiding party into New Mexico in 1916, recalling "how yellow the Americans had been, of how they had begged for their lives, how they had sh- and pissed in their pants, crying 'No me mates, no me mates, yo soy amigo de los mejicanos.'"
   
   In the mid-1930s, Corona came to the University of Southern California on a basketball scholarship. Although he dropped out of USC, he learned to drive to his left. "Socialism could solve many of the problems created by capitalism," Corona told his biographer. "The Communist Party always stressed the example of the Soviet Union and of the significant progress there since the Bolshevik Revolution."
   
   After leaving college, Corona worked with Harry Bridges, longshore boss and secret Communist, as the Venona intercepts of Soviet intelligence traffic confirm.
   ...
   Corona is unapologetic about his Party affiliations: "It is important to understand that a strong relationship existed between Mexican-American activists and the Communist Party in the 1930s." Further, "the Communist Party contained many dedicated people . . . not solely interested in promoting the Party but committed to advancing the cause of working and poor people." As an organization, he says, the CP played "a positive role in trying to build a democratic trade-union movement that would be controlled by the rank and file."
   
   Corona's beat was the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), then solidly Communist in leadership. "The CIO developed a very important relationship with the growing number of Mexican youth gangs in the barrios," notes Corona. "While some delinquency and crimes were associated with gangs, many gangs served as mini-communities for youth." Corona would later cultivate similar relationships of his own.
   
   By all evidence, Corona stayed the course during the Nazi­Soviet Pact, when the Party picketed the White House, called Roosevelt a warmonger, and Party-backed CIO unions struck American defense plants such as North American Aviation in Inglewood, California. Roosevelt called in the troops. Max Silver, a longtime Party boss in Los Angeles, identified Corona as a CP member before World War II, when Party members were given a leave of absence to be patriotic.
   ...
   Corona served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles Communist School with Party stalwarts LaRue McCormick, Eva Shafran, and Leo Gallagher.
   ...
   After the war, the mass revolutionary upheaval many Communists had been expecting failed to materialize in America, but Corona continued organizing along the lines pioneered by Saul Alinsky.
   ...
   Corona helpfully notes that ANMA, the Asociacion Nacional Mexico-Americana, was involved with both the longshoremen and the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, a CP-led group that backed the making of Salt of the Earth.
   
   Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin made things difficult for CP organizers during the 1950s, when the CIO joined with the anti-Communist American Federation of Labor. But the following decade turned things around for Corona, who kept the faith through hard times.
   
   He busied himself running the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), the successor to ANMA. In 1965, California Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, Jerry's father, appointed Corona to the California Civil Rights Commission.
   ...
   During the '60s, Corona threw MAPA's support to the Brown Berets, a Chicano militia styled after the Black Panthers, with its own "minister of information" and education, and which had begun in Los Angeles as "Young Citizens for Community Action." Corona organized the National Chicano Moratorium, to oppose U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
   
   In 1968, Corona gave a nationally televised address to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, urging the seating of the "Texas irregulars," a group that included Chicano militants. The following year Corona founded Hermandad Mexicana Nacional to work for the interests of immigrants, a new vanguard he exploited for other causes, bragging that "we also organized them in protest against the war" in Vietnam.
   
   During the 1970s Corona broke with the Democrats and worked with the separatist La Raza Unida party based on the irredentist concept of a paradise lost called Aztlan, the occupied Chicano nation in the southwest that needs to be wrested from Anglos "by any means necessary."
   
   Though he lacked a college degree, he secured a job as a part-time professor in the Chicano Studies Department at California State University-Los Angeles, where he taught for more than a decade, survived an attempt to fire him for liberal grading policies, and got many of his fellow activists hired. Described in a May 24, 1982, Los Angeles Times story as "an energetic man with a booming voice and a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint," Corona told Robert Cantu, a legitimate scholar about to gain tenure, to get out of the department because his retention in a tenured post would mean fewer part-time hires.
   ...
   Cantu recalls that Corona surrounded himself with a "bunch of thugs," one of whom threatened the professor.
   ...
   "What happened to your car is nothing," Cantu says Corona later told him.
   ...
   Corona also opposed Professor Hector Soto-Perez, who found his tires slashed and brake cable cut.
   ...
   Corona blamed the attacks on the police, but after he left campus, the violence stopped. Corona went on to teaching stints at Cal State Northridge, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, and Harvard. His message involved support for the increasingly unstable Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. "Renewed class struggle in these societies will lead to new forms of social arrangements," he said. "The workers of East Germany, for example, aren't about to give up easily many of the supports they had under socialism, such as low rents and free education for their children."
   
   In 1996, the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a legacy of the CP heyday in Southern California, honored Corona and his Hermandad troops.
   ...
   Corona had prevailed on the Los Angeles Times to stop using the phrase "illegal alien," which gave way to "undocumented." When the Los Angeles Times wrote about Hermandad registering non-citizens to vote, the group rushed a mob of 300 protesters to the paper's offices in Costa Mesa, demanding a boycott of the publication. It didn't work and, for all his leverage, Corona was unable to block the Times reporting on Hermandad's financial woes.
   
   By 1997, despite receiving a staggering $35 million in grants during the previous decade, Corona's Hermandad was $8 million in debt, including $4.2 million on its new Los Angeles health clinic. In 1995, Hermandad was evicted from its North Hollywood office and sued for $400,000 in back rent.

2. 2. Ethnic Politics Gets Nasty

   www.americanpatrol.com/DIVERSI - [Cached]

   Published on: 10/1/1999   Last Visited: 2/23/2004

   The executive director of Hermandad, at the center of the CBO storm, is Bert Corona, occasionally referred to as Humberto Corona, hailed as a Latino leader, a colleague of Cesar Chavez, an advocate for immigrants, and a friend of Bill Clinton who keeps a residence in Washington.
   ...
   Corona was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1919, and recalls that the high school there was integrated, including its sports teams. "I don't recall any racial tensions that accompanied playing at El Paso High," Corona told his biographer Mario Garcia.
   ...
   Though born in the United States, Corona did not think of himself as an American or even a Mexican-American. "We as Mexicans also had a historic and rightful claim to El Paso and the Southwest," he has said.
   
   Corona recounts with delight stories he was told as a child of Pancho Villa's raiding party into New Mexico in 1916, recalling "how yellow the Americans had been, of how they had begged for their lives, how they had sh- and pissed in their pants, crying 'No me mates, no me mates, yo soy amigo de los mejicanos.'"
   
   In the mid-1930s, Corona came to the University of Southern California on a basketball scholarship. Although he dropped out of USC, he learned to drive to his left. "Socialism could solve many of the problems created by capitalism," Corona told his biographer. "The Communist Party always stressed the example of the Soviet Union and of the significant progress there since the Bolshevik Revolution."
   
   After leaving college, Corona worked with Harry Bridges, longshore boss and secret Communist, as the Venona intercepts of Soviet intelligence traffic confirm.
   ...
   Corona is unapologetic about his Party affiliations: "It is important to understand that a strong relationship existed between Mexican-American activists and the Communist Party in the 1930s." Further, "the Communist Party contained many dedicated people . . . not solely interested in promoting the Party but committed to advancing the cause of working and poor people." As an organization, he says, the CP played "a positive role in trying to build a democratic trade-union movement that would be controlled by the rank and file."
   
   Corona's beat was the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), then solidly Communist in leadership. "The CIO developed a very important relationship with the growing number of Mexican youth gangs in the barrios," notes Corona. "While some delinquency and crimes were associated with gangs, many gangs served as mini-communities for youth." Corona would later cultivate similar relationships of his own.
   
   By all evidence, Corona stayed the course during the Nazi­Soviet Pact, when the Party picketed the White House, called Roosevelt a warmonger, and Party-backed CIO unions struck American defense plants such as North American Aviation in Inglewood, California. Roosevelt called in the troops. Max Silver, a longtime Party boss in Los Angeles, identified Corona as a CP member before World War II, when Party members were given a leave of absence to be patriotic.
   ...
   Corona served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles Communist School with Party stalwarts LaRue McCormick, Eva Shafran, and Leo Gallagher.
   ...
   After the war, the mass revolutionary upheaval many Communists had been expecting failed to materialize in America, but Corona continued organizing along the lines pioneered by Saul Alinsky.
   ...
   Corona helpfully notes that ANMA, the Asociacion Nacional Mexico-Americana, was involved with both the longshoremen and the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, a CP-led group that backed the making of Salt of the Earth.
   
   Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin made things difficult for CP organizers during the 1950s, when the CIO joined with the anti-Communist American Federation of Labor. But the following decade turned things around for Corona, who kept the faith through hard times.
   
   He busied himself running the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), the successor to ANMA. In 1965, California Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, Jerry's father, appointed Corona to the California Civil Rights Commission.
   ...
   During the '60s, Corona threw MAPA's support to the Brown Berets, a Chicano militia styled after the Black Panthers, with its own "minister of information" and education, and which had begun in Los Angeles as "Young Citizens for Community Action." Corona organized the National Chicano Moratorium, to oppose U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
   
   In 1968, Corona gave a nationally televised address to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, urging the seating of the "Texas irregulars," a group that included Chicano militants. The following year Corona founded Hermandad Mexicana Nacional to work for the interests of immigrants, a new vanguard he exploited for other causes, bragging that "we also organized them in protest against the war" in Vietnam.
   
   During the 1970s Corona broke with the Democrats and worked with the separatist La Raza Unida party based on the irredentist concept of a paradise lost called Aztlan, the occupied Chicano nation in the southwest that needs to be wrested from Anglos "by any means necessary."
   
   Though he lacked a college degree, he secured a job as a part-time professor in the Chicano Studies Department at California State University-Los Angeles, where he taught for more than a decade, survived an attempt to fire him for liberal grading policies, and got many of his fellow activists hired. Described in a May 24, 1982, Los Angeles Times story as "an energetic man with a booming voice and a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint," Corona told Robert Cantu, a legitimate scholar about to gain tenure, to get out of the department because his retention in a tenured post would mean fewer part-time hires.
   ...
   Cantu recalls that Corona surrounded himself with a "bunch of thugs," one of whom threatened the professor.
   ...
   "What happened to your car is nothing," Cantu says Corona later told him.
   ...
   Corona also opposed Professor Hector Soto-Perez, who found his tires slashed and brake cable cut.
   ...
   Corona blamed the attacks on the police, but after he left campus, the violence stopped. Corona went on to teaching stints at Cal State Northridge, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, and Harvard. His message involved support for the increasingly unstable Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. "Renewed class struggle in these societies will lead to new forms of social arrangements," he said. "The workers of East Germany, for example, aren't about to give up easily many of the supports they had under socialism, such as low rents and free education for their children."
   
   In 1996, the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a legacy of the CP heyday in Southern California, honored Corona and his Hermandad troops.
   ...
   Corona had prevailed on the Los Angeles Times to stop using the phrase "illegal alien," which gave way to "undocumented." When the Los Angeles Times wrote about Hermandad registering non-citizens to vote, the group rushed a mob of 300 protesters to the paper's offices in Costa Mesa, demanding a boycott of the publication. It didn't work and, for all his leverage, Corona was unable to block the Times reporting on Hermandad's financial woes.
   
   By 1997, despite receiving a staggering $35 million in grants during the previous decade, Corona's Hermandad was $8 million in debt, including $4.2 million on its new Los Angeles health clinic.