Volume , Number 0
Foreign Policy
Fareed Marjaee
Crime & Punishment
Tim Wise
American Journalism: A Class Act
Norman Solomon
MediaMatters
Chris Shumway
The United States in the …
Stephen Shalom
Patriotism Is An Olympic Event
Lydia Sargent
Education
Site Administrator
Differing Agendas in South Asia
Justin Podur
Reform
Bryan g. Pfeifer
Reform
Bryan g. Pfeifer
Psychiatric Medications, Illicit Drugs, & …
Bruce Levine
Surveillance
Chad Kautzer
Fog Watch
Edward Herman
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David Hajdu
Martin Glaberman: 1918-2001
Neil Fettes
Economic Policy
Site Administrator
Television
Michael Bronski
Collateral Damage
Anthony Arnove
Society's Pliers
Michael Albert
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Roxanne Dunbar-ortiz
Commentary
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Features
Yuppie Eugenics
Ruth hubbard and Stuart newman
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
San Francisco: City Lights, 2002
Review
by
Elizabeth Martinez
This gem of a book sparkles with revelations about what the 1960s were like for a working-class part-Indian woman from Oklahoma turned feminist-Marxist revolutionary on her way underground. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is also, and I rarely use the word, a unique activist/scholar/author. Her contribution ranges from leadership in the women’s movement to long-term solidarity work with Nicaraguans to scholarship that has produced extensive works on native peoples struggles to 20 years as an international human rights activist at the United Nations representing a non-govern- mental organization.
Hang on to your hats, because this book is also a suspenseful, good read. In a previous book Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, the author described her early years in an isolated, racist, rural area dominated by anti-communism but with a tradition of Wobbly militancy in her own family that set an example of working-class white radical politics along with memories of the repression it encountered. By her first year at Oklahoma University, she had already become anti-imperialist and anti-racist, with a focus on the Middle East and South Africa. Outlaw Woman, the new book in what will be a 3-volume memoir, finds her in San Francisco in 1960 at age 21 with a husband who wants a traditional wife and doesn’t find her in “Roxie.”
Not that the author sheds all convention immediately. For a time she was “the little housewife” and wore her hair in the middle-class “Jackie Kennedy bouffant” style of the era. Being assaulted on a street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District by a drunken woman who screamed “you think you’re something, don’t you, fancy lady?” was key to her shaking off painful memories of an abusive, alcoholic mother and at the same time coming to hate the proper lady she, Roxanne, had become. From there the author went to long straight hair and expert shoplifting, various lovers, acquiring a daughter and losing a husband, and intense, constant study in graduate school. We follow her rapid political growth, especially the impact of hearing Malcolm X speak, and an emerging feminism.
Earlier, the alienation she first experienced in her contact with San Francisco activists carries a message that should never be forgotten today. Coming from rural Oklahoma, it never occurred to her that she could just join a protest; she thought one had to be invited. So when she encountered a campus table where CORE was recruiting people for the Freedom Rides through the South, “It seemed like an exclusive club to which I could never belong.” Thinking perhaps she could do volunteer office work, she worked up her nerve one day to approach the table. Hesitantly, in her southern accent, she asked: “Are you-all going to be talking to poor whites down there?” It wasn’t the question she had intended but it had crossed her mind. The response was a long stare, followed by total rejection.
The “cliquenishness of the movement” is a danger that Dunbar-Ortiz never forgets, without constantly hammering on it. When a man in the audience at an anti-war event where she speaks asks her companion, Homer, “You ain’t one of them peaceniks, are you?” she describes the moment with friendly humor and none of the patronizing or self-righteous tone he might have heard elsewhere.
In this and other ways, the author’s class perspective colors her book. When she finally overcomes that initial self-effacement, her first political effort is to organize a union—in this case, of university faculty and graduate students like her (at the University of California Los Angeles). She discontinues one major relationship because the man’s upper-class lifestyle and worldview become stifling.
The most vivid moment of her working-class consciousness comes after the screening of a documentary about the SDS-led occupation of Columbia University. Young men in bomber jackets and motorcycle boots strut around the stage, haranguing the audience about how to become a real revolutionary, you have to kill your parents. Dunbar-Ortiz watches a middle-aged Latino janitor who came on the stage to set up a lectern, ignored by the self-named Motherfuckers. She thinks of her father, who worked at a school after he quit sharecropping and how her older brother and sister, students at the same school, were ashamed of their father being a janitor there. Now she sees the Latino janitor stiffen at the words “kill your parents” as he turns to face the audience with a terrified expression.
In this book the author’s personal development through local, national, and international experiences parallels events with a breathtaking speed that illuminates the inspiration as well as the challenges of the era. We charge through the Cuban Revolution, assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the anti-apartheid movement, the Vietnam war protests, the 1967 uprising for land rights in New Mexico, Che Guevara and his capture, SDS, the southern movement and Anne Braden, the 1970 Chicano Moratorium against the war and three Chicanos killed by police that day—all in all, a global kaleidoscope of humanity in struggle. Two themes come to stand out in Dunbar-Ortiz’s personal evolution.
The first is her feminism, launched when she read Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and began to see the family as the root of female oppression. Then she was catapulted into ferocious conviction when she heard of Valeria Solanas shooting Andy Warhol and releasing a proclamation known as the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto. Reading this news in Mexico, she left immediately for Boston to find Solanas instead of going on to Cuba as planned.
Thus began her leadership role in the women’s movement with the formation of Cell 16 and its journal No More Fun and Games along with its signatory practice of Tae Kwan Do self-defense for women. In critiquing the sexism that characterized revolutionary struggles around the world, including leaders Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, she managed to find a balance that was rare in the women’s movement. She identified the prevailing view of revolution then as state-based and saw the nation-state as a fundamentally patriarchal entity.
The book zeroes in on much debated issues of the time, like the claim that the struggle for women’s liberation would prove divisive. As the war went on and the violence at home also continued, her worldview began to shift its focus from women’s liberation as the crucial, central, key to any and all revolution to a reassessment of her politics to a conviction of the need for underground, armed struggle.
The book’s epilogue entitled “Un-Forgetting” (in Greek, that is the word for truth) is a passionate affirmation of the war years as “A truly revolutionary moment [not] confined to the United States or to one generation. Something new happened then, something deeper and more radical than ever before in history.”
So much for all the trashing or trivialization of “the Sixties” that plagues us today. So much for defining those years only by white student radicalism plus some black militancy. So much for a romanticization that prevents young people today from learning crucial lessons of the era. Just read this book and find out what that “something new” was, in the eyes of an extraordinary warrior woman.
Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez is a Chicana writer and professor. She has been an anti-racist activist for 40 years.
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