Economy Company Furniture Strike of 1968
From 1968 to 1971, change unfolded in Austin, Texas. After being denied the right to unionize, the majority-Chicano workers at the Economy Furniture Company demanded justice by strike - the Austin Chicano Huelga. The strikers, or huelguistas, kept up the strike for over two years before reaching a settlement. During that period, they experienced discrimination from their employer, the court system, the police, and the media. This exhibit aims to analyze the Austin Chicano Huelga as an example of the potential for every day people to demand justice realized and to draw attention to the huelguistas' means of doing so.
Racial inequality can be understood through a class-differentiated model of internal colonialism, wherein economic exploitation of one ethnicity by another occurs inside one country (Barrera). A look at the historical and structural context of the Huelga will reveal the efficacy of this model for understanding what caused the strike and how it played out - not as a function of nature or accident of circumstance but as a product of choices made by those with power and without it.
The Austin huelguistas were not an isolated case, but part of a pattern of Chicano workers across the Southwest, disenfranchised over time by the spread of Anglo capitalist dominance yet not submissive to it. In the late 1960s, some Mexican American identities shifted from white to non-white Chicano because of the legal violence differentiating Chicanos from whites. The legal violence experienced by the 1960s huelguistas shaped their identities as Chicanos in sharp contrast to the Anglo workers often exempt from it (Barrera). Tactics of resistance by the huelguistas included public interruption, picketing, and distribution of consciousness-raising art. Such approaches are part of the larger legacy of Latino activism represented in this exhibit and can serve as inspiration for future leftists.