Latina/o Anticolonial Struggles and the

Commission on Hispanic Affairs of the Episcopal Church

Michael Staudenmaier, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

mstaud1@illinois.edu

Paper for the 129th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
Part of the panel “Latino Radicalisms, 1930s-70s”
Word Count: 2,402 (excluding headers)

[Note: this is very much a work in progress, an early stab at part of one chapter of my
dissertation; feedback is greatly appreciated.]

Part One: Setting the Scene

One Sunday in the spring of 1977, the New York Times featured a long, exposé-

style article on page A1. Here’s the melodramatic opener:

The dynamite comes from the Southwest. The bombs go off in Manhattan, the Chicago
Loop, the Newark Police Headquarters, the nation’s capital. The bombers’ notes call for
Puerto Rican independence, but Mexican-Americans are among the suspects and
subpoenaed witnesses.1

With the scene thus set, the article suggested that the apparent linchpin in this alleged

terrorist conspiracy – one that supposedly brought together Puerto Rican and Chicano

radicals committed to clandestine violence – was a little known arm of a major mainline

protestant denomination: The National Commission on Hispanic Affairs (NCHA) of the

Episcopal Church USA. In the equally alarmist closer, the Times reporter proclaimed

that “In retrospect, some wondered aloud whether a clique of radicals had moved

among them, doing the church’s work in public while in private setting bombs.” 2

1
Mary Breasted, “3-Year Inquiry Threads Together Evidence on FALN Terrorism,” The New York
Times, April 17, 1977, 1.
2
Breasted, “3-Year Inquiry,” 49.

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 Whatever we might think of the quality and objectivity of the Times reportage in

this case, the article did at the very least restate the official position of the United States

government accurately and at length. In the second half of the 1970s the FBI was

desperate to stop a continuing series of armed actions claimed by the Fuerzas Armadas

de Liberación Nacional (FALN). By 1977, the FALN had detonated approximately seventy

bombs over its first three years of existence, all on behalf of the fundamental demand

for a free and socialist Puerto Rico, and not a single member of the group had been

captured.

Starting in the late 1970s, the government’s main weapon to combat the FALN

was a set of grand jury investigations. Grand juries, so much in the news lately because

of the high-profile non-indictments of Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, have a

contrary but much longer history of being used to attack the organized left in the United

States. Grand juries are useful to the government in this regard because they provide

few rights or options to those subpoenaed as witnesses: no lawyers may accompany

you into the session when you testify, and in many cases you may not invoke your

customary 5th amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. (This is part of what made

the Ferguson grand jury so exceptional, the fact that Wilson felt comfortable enough to

testify for several hours without a lawyer to keep him from incriminating himself. It’s

almost enough to make you think he sort of knew that he wasn’t going to be indicted….

Anyway.) Anyone may be called as a witness, and failure to testify can easily result in a

lengthy jail sentence for “civil contempt.” Thus, grand juries like those aimed at the

2
FALN serve a dual purpose: intelligence gathering and repression of broader social

movements.

When the Times article was published, the federal government was operating

two grand juries targeting the FALN, one in New York City and one in Chicago. The

NCHA was the immediate focus of both, in part because the first person identified by

police as a member of the FALN, Carlos Alberto Torres, had previously served on the

Commission. By 1977 he was a wanted fugitive, and in the words of the Times article

once again, the government “is proceeding on the theory that Mr. Torres and his friends

in the FALN used the church commission to cover their activities.”3

In this context – the unexpected nexus of Christian groups and clandestine cells,

of grand juries and resistance movements – we can find a crucial if overlooked moment

in the construction of pan-Latino social movements, one that connects religious and

secular modes of organizing, not to mention legal and extra-legal strategies.

Surprisingly, the disruption of the NCHA by the grand jury served neither the intelligence

gathering nor the repressive goals that the federal government had expected they

would, at least in the short term. To understand why this happened, it is important to

understand the relationship of Latina/o anti-colonial struggles to both church and

clandestinity in the latter half of the 1970s.

Part Two: The NCHA

3
Breasted, “3-Year Inquiry,” 49.

3
 The Episcopal Church, part of the world-wide Anglican Communion, is one of the

largest protestant denominations in the United States. It also has a history of being one

of the most liberal on social issues, since at least the nineteenth century. 4 The general

leftward shift of US society in the 1960s pushed the Episcopal Church even further to

the left, and efforts to break out of its overwhelmingly white demographic confines led

it to establish a series of Commissions aimed at expanding work in communities of color.

According to the head of the Church during those years, Presiding Bishop John Hines,

these efforts operated on the model that the Church “had to be willing to identify itself

with movements that were militant in outlook.”5

From its inception in 1970, the NCHA embraced this approach, developing ties

with activists in Spanish-speaking communities from the Southwest to the Northeast of

the United States. The head of the Commission for many years was Maria Cueto, a

Chicana woman originally from Phoenix, who expressed the ambitions of the NCHA in

explicitly political, and explicitly Pan-Latina/o, terms:

Those were our interests – to bring together some kind of understanding between the
two movements. A lot of the Chicanos who were part of the Commission had no idea
what the Puerto Rican struggle was all about … And a lot of the Puerto Rican people had
very little idea even as to what a Chicano was. So it was an educational process that we
all underwent together.6

4
For an overview of the long history of Episcopal engagement with social issues, see
Bernard Kent Markwell, The Anglican Left: Radical Social Reformers in the Church of
England and the Protestant Episcopal Church, 1846-1954 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing,
1991).
5
Quoted in Kenneth A. Briggs, “Episcopal Leaders Badly Split in Fight On Hispanic Panel”, The
New York Times, April 1, 1977, 1.
6
“Interview with Maria Cueto and Raisa Nemikin,” Que Ondee Sola, March, 1978, 10.

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As a result, the NCHA always maintained a diverse membership from across the US. The

members of the Commission met regularly in order to facilitate deeper conversations

and collaborations across the range of ethnicities and geographies of what now gets

termed Latinidad in the United States.

When the two grand juries were established, prosecutors quickly approached

the Episcopal Church and the NCHA in particular, looking for information about Torres.

While the leadership of the Church was open to assisting the investigation, Cueto and

her assistant, Raisa Nemikin, refused to cooperate, citing the confidentiality that their

work in Latina/o communities required. For their troubles, they not only went to jail for

several months, they also lost their jobs after centrists in the Episcopal Church

overhauled the NCHA structure. Their refusal to testify caused significant tension within

the upper leadership of the Church. The new presiding bishop, John M. Allin, criticized

them for their non-compliance, while other bishops supported them. For instance, at

one meeting of the Church’s Executive Council, held while the two women were

imprisoned, the bishop of Philadelphia

reminded the [Church’s Executive] Council that Grand Jury sessions are secret. If the
two women "go before that Grand Jury, are sworn in, and they stay in two minutes," he
said, "and answer one question, 'No, I don't know anything,' nobody is going to know
what was said while they were in those secret hearings. And therefore when they walk
out even though they have not said a word to indict anybody, in that community they
are going to be suspected by everybody, because nobody knows what they said. And I
guess I just don't believe that Maria and Raisa are willing at this point to give their life
for it, not to just satisfy our asking, 'Why don't they just go in?' Bishop Allin, they can't
do that."7

7
“National and World Mission Concerns Considered,” Episcopal News Service,
December 8, 1977; online at http://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-
bin/ENS/ENSpress_release.pl?pr_number=77411 (accessed October 15, 2014)

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For Cueto and Nemikin’s part, they never waivered in their convictions, either religious

or political, and they never denounced or even criticized the official targets of the grand

jury investigation. As Cueto put it in an interview after their release, “We work with the

church. We struggle from that level. Other people struggle from different levels. We

do not condemn or condone the actions of the FALN.” 8

Part Three: Pan-Latino Anti-colonialism

The FALN was itself clearly following the developing drama around the grand

juries. At least four different communiqués issued by the group in 1977 included

demands for an “END TO GRAND JURY ABUSE!”9 However, rather than focusing on its

status as the ultimate target of the grand juries, the FALN instead emphasized the need

to oppose what it argued was the federal government’s overall objective of “stop[ping]

the growth of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement” and “trying to stop other

third world and progressive movements from voicing opposition to Yanki imperialism.” 10

This was a tactically sound move in a context where armed struggle for Puerto

Rican independence had very limited support, even while a broad range of groups and

individuals denounced the grand juries for jailing religious activists like Cueto and

Nemikin. Denver, for instance, had no Puerto Rican community, but when three

Chicano radicals were subpoenaed based on their connections to the Commission, local
8
“Interview with Maria Cueto and Raisa Nemikin,” Que Ondee Sola, March, 1978, 10.
9
FALN Communiqué, August 3, 1977, reprinted in Toward People’s War for Independence and
Socialism in Puerto Rico: In Defense of Armed Struggle: Documents and Communiqués from the
Revolutionary Public Independence Movement and the Armed Clandestine Movement (Chicago:
Committee in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence, et. al., 1979), 70. Similar language
appears in communiqués dated February 17, March 20, and April 9, 1977.
10
FALN Communiqués, April 9 and March 20, 1977.

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civil rights groups helped organize multiple demonstrations tying the grand juries to

ongoing government harassment of local organizing in barrio communities. 11

People took different paths to grand jury resistance, just as their supporters had

a variety of reasons for defending them. Cueto and Nemikin emphasized the

conscience-based reasons for their refusal to testify, while several of their fellow

resistors focused instead on the anti-colonial nature of their confrontation with the US

government. For instance, Pedro Archuleta, a Chicano militant from New Mexico and

former member of the NCHA who was subpoenaed to both the New York and Chicago

grand juries, explained his willingness to go to jail as an extension of the class-conscious

Chicano nationalism that had led him to participate in land occupations and protests

against police brutality:

Because the Grand Jury is being used to smash the organizations of poor and powerless
people, I will not cooperate in this repression … What I have done here today – refusing
to talk to the Grand Jury – I have done it with pride. You can put me in jail for a year or
ten years and I will never talk to you because I am proud of being a Chicano and fighting
for justice.12

This stance was simultaneously deeply political and quite pragmatic, situating itself at

the intersection of efforts to build pan-Latina/o coalitions and the common working

class injunction against snitching.

In the midst of the two grand jury investigations, on June 22, 1977, the

Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN) was founded at a conference in Chicago. In

11
Ernesto B. Vigil, Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on
Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 347-354. Vigil himself served as
a member of the NCHA in the mid-1970s.
12
Quoted in The Political Grand Jury: An Instrument of Repression (New York:
Committee Against Grand Jury Repression, nd [1978?]), 1.

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retrospect, the MLN has generally been portrayed as part of the radical wing of the

Puerto Rican independence movement. But this interpretation omits the notable fact

that the core principles of the MLN called for “the strategic unity of Chicano-Mexicanos

and Puerto Ricans within the framework of one organization.” 13 This may be the only

example in the history of the US left of a single national liberation organization that

combined two distinct national groupings. The overlap between the MLN’s leadership

and the NCHA was notable, and several of the nine grand jury resisters were also co-

founders of the MLN, meaning that the group spent its first year of existence with much

of its leadership, both Puerto Rican and Mexican, in jail. In a sense, then, the mere

survival of the MLN (the group lasted well into the 1980s) served as evidence that the

collective experience of pan-Latina/o anti-colonial struggles was part of the legacy of the

NCHA experience that had broadened the horizons of both Puerto Rican and Mexican

radicals during the 1970s.

Part Four: Conclusion

While the federal government clearly intended the grand juries to undermine

both movements as well as the links between them, more or less the opposite

happened. Cueto was asked in an interview whether the grand juries and the FBI

harassment had weakened or strengthened connections between the Chicano and

Puerto Rican movements. In her words,

13
Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, The MLN and the Struggle of Vieques: Discussion
Document No. 7 (Chicago: Rebeldia Publications, 1980), 2.

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I think they’ll become stronger. We think, for example, that our release had to do with
the pressure than was applied from the community at large across the country. So that
the issues are becoming clearer to many. It’s confirmed to a lot of people that the FBI
really is what it is – a monster that’s trying to destroy human being’s self-
determination.14

The impact was felt far beyond the limited numbers in the MLN. The shared experience

of government repression and support for the grand jury resisters brought together sets

of activists from both Puerto Rican and Mexican/Chicana/o backgrounds who were

engaged in otherwise quite disconnected struggles. While the experience of the

National Commission on Hispanic Affairs and the struggle around the 1977 grand juries

has been largely forgotten or ignored, it played an important role in the emergence of

pan-Latina/o social movements that continue to this day.

14
“Interview with Maria Cueto and Raisa Nemikin,” Que Ondee Sola, March, 1978, 12.