Building Blocks

Immediately following the Garbage Offensive, the Young Lords established an office headquarters in East Harlem, deepened its ties to the welfare rights movement in New York and established a police-watch project in the community. The group also fortified its organizational structure. Two of its Central Committee members Pablo Guzman and Juan Gonzalez drafted a Thirteen-Point Program and Political Platform. The group also developed a rubric for political education, and established an organizational routine for integrating new members and deepening the training of existing ones.

Chicana Militant Dignity Work

This article explores the 1960s welfare rights movement in Los Angeles as one example of social justice activism based on Black-Brown coalition building and solidarity across various social movements. Within the larger welfare rights movement, a fundamentally feminist cause, Escalante advocated for the specific cultural, linguistic, and legal needs of the Spanish-speaking community. Participating in Black-Brown solidarity for multiple social justice causes in Los Angeles and nationally, Alicia Escalante faced arrests and police violence, modeling and inspiring her children and others, then and now, to militant dignity work.

Welfare, Poverty, and Low-Wage Employment

This chapter describes women’s social movement activity for economic justice, with an emphasis on race and gender intersectionality. The chapter begins with a case study of the welfare rights movement. It then describes tensions between issue and identity frames in the literature on poor women’s mobilization. This discussion links the intersectional politics of the movements to the intersectional dynamics of social movement scholarship. The chapter then homes in on two overlapping sectors of women’s labor organizing—child care and domestic work—in order to highlight the emergent themes more empirically. The intersectional politics and scope of women’s organizing for economic justice challenge scholars to develop new frameworks for understanding social movement activity.

A Different Kind of Welfare State

This chapter looks at the new voices that began speaking for child care, both in California and across the nation: black mothers in the welfare rights movement and white middle-class women in the feminist movement. While black and white poor mothers organized in CPACC and around welfare rights, a more visible women's movement developed among predominantly the white middle class. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) emerged out of frustration over the government's unwillingness to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination by sex as well as by race illegal. With seasoned women's rights, labor feminists, and a few black women at its helm, NOW quickly moved to the forefront of the struggle for women's equality.

When Dissident Citizens Are Militant Mamas: Intersectional Gender and Agonistic Struggle in Welfare Rights Activism

In this article, I argue that contemporary theories of agonistic democracy offer provocative insights into democratic activism and protest but require a more robust account of intersectional gender to adequately theorize the challenges of disruptive dissent. To this end, I propose an agonistic and feminist account of “dissident citizenship,” the democratic practices of disruption used to problematize and disturb the status quo when formal channels of democratic change are inadequate. My account foregrounds how intersectional gender formations pervade dissident practices, including activists’ ongoing struggles with their critics over their democratic standing and performances of disruption. I illustrate these theoretical claims through a case study of dissident citizenship drawn from U.S. politics, the welfare rights movement of 1966–75. Intersectional gender formations assisted welfare activists in claiming democratic standing as loving, hardworking mothers and in becoming bold dissidents. It was nonetheless exceedingly difficult for the poor, usually minority “militant mamas” to remain intelligible as full citizens when critics rejected their claims as the greediness of “breeders” and “cheaters” and dismissed their democratic disruptions as offensive, violence-causing disorders. Attending to intersectional gender dynamics highlights critical dimensions of democratic contestation that agonistic theories must address more carefully.