Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez

• Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez
• Born: December 12, 1925

Is a civil rights activist, author, and educator. Martínez was one of the earliest voices that articulated what would eventually come to be called intersectionality. Intersectionality is the ways in which race, class, gender, and multiple other identities overlap and intersect in marginalized peoples or groups. These intersections must be considered in order to form greater connections with other activists and in creating better organizations to challenge exclusive systems.

Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez was born in Washington, D.C., in 1925 to an American mother and a Mexican father. In 1946, Martínez graduated from Swarthmore College, a small elite liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, where she majored in history and literature. In 1948, she moved to New York City to work for the United Nations researching the conditions of non-self-governing territories, or colonies, in Africa and the Pacific. She worked for the UN until 1954. In 1959, only three months after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara marched into Havana, Cuba, and overthrew the Batista dictatorship, Martínez visited the country to see the Cuban Revolution for herself. Her interest in Third World self-determination would lead her into more activism in the U.S. Support for anti-colonial causes were difficult during the 1950s and 1960s because of the anti-communist hysteria spreading across the nation. Indeed, many of Martínez’s co-workers at the U.N. office would be accused of being communists later in their careers. In 1958, Martínez started working as an editor at Simon & Schuster and as the books and arts editor at The Nation. Due to discrimination, Martínez worked and wrote under the name Liz Sutherland, shortening her first name and using her mother’s maiden name.

In the 1960s, Martínez worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as an organizer. In 1964, she helped register voters in Mississippi during the famous Freedom Summer, when three staffers were murdered by white supremacists. From 1965 to 1967, she was the director of the New York office of SNCC and only one of two Chicana SNCC staffers. As the SNCC moved toward its own goals of self-determination, Martínez became interested in the emergent Chicano Movement in the Southwest.

In 1968, Martínez moved to New Mexico and started a Chicano newspaper called El Grito del Norte. She served as the editor of the paper for five years and watched it grow into one of the most influential and widely read newspapers of the Chicano Movement. Martínez was drawn to New Mexico by an organization called the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, the premiere organization of the Land Grant movement led by the fiery Reies Lopez Tijerina. The Alianza was an organization of Hispanos whose family lines dated back to the Spanish period of the 1600s. Their families had received sizeable land grants from the Spanish king, while others received land from the Mexican government after 1821. By the 1960s, almost all of these ethnic Mexicans had lost their land, and Tijerina and the Alianza were trying to take back the land through legal cases and more confrontational measures.

While Martínez covered the Chicano Movement as a journalist, she was also an activist. She attended the first national meeting of Chicana and Chicano organizers from across the nation, the 1969 National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado. The following year, she participated in the Chicano Moratorium, the largest ethnic-led anti-war demonstration in U.S. history. In 1972, she attended the national convention of the Raza Unida Party in El Paso, Texas. When she left her paper in 1973, she co-founded the Chicano Communications Center, a community service and education center.

As a writer, Martínez articulated a sense of intersectionality before the term had come into popular use. She wrote about how discrimination based on race, gender, and class all intersected into a longer history of colonization. In order to work together and establish solidarity, groups needed to recognize all of these multiple identities and build connections based on them.

In 1976, Martínez moved to the Bay Area in California and worked with Latino organizations. In 1982, she was the program director of Global Options, an organization dedicated to labor and social issues. She led education seminars is women’s studies and anti-racist training workshops. In 1983, Martinez ran for governor of California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, but did not win the election.

In 1997, Martínez co-founded the Institute for MultiRacial Justice, which aims to fight against white supremacy and incite a sense of solidarity among minorities. Martínez serves as the co-chair of the Institute and is the editor of their publication, Shades of Power, which promotes anti-racist and anti-capitalist ideas and covers issues of environment and social justice, police brutality, immigration, and workers’ rights.

In 1998, Martinez published De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views of a Multi-Colored Century, an influential book in the field of women’s studies, Chicana/o studies, and global studies. In the book, she critiqued the sexist and nationalist approaches of the civil rights era. Those organizations, which were generally led by men, tended to use misogynistic language even though most of their volunteers and members were women. In De Colores Means All of Us, she wrote: “Nationalism will not end in this country until racism ends. But we must constantly struggle to revolutionize its meaning and find a more liberatory call to oneness. Failure to do so means we insist on living in the past, confused by the demands of a new multi-colored century and doomed to stumble backward blindly when we could run forward toward the light.”

After the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, Martínez became the founding editor of the anti-war paper War Times for a year. In 2004, she served on the advisory board for Racism Watch. Martinez still writes and lectures, although a stroke in 2005 pushed her into semi-retirement.

In recognition for her contributions to so many fields, especially in Chicana/o studies and social justice, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies named her Scholar of the Year in 2000, the highest award the organization gives. Martínez participated in some of the most important struggles in the nation and her Chicana feminist anti-colonial writings and ideas have contributed to a growing field of study. Martínez’s early articulations of intersectionality evolved into one of the most important theoretical approaches to social organization and solidarity in the twenty-first century.

In addition to Martínez’s books, other writings that may be helpful include Elizabeth Martínez, “A View from New Mexico: Recollections of the Movimiento Left,” Monthly Review (July/August 2002), Elizabeth Martínez, Matt Meyer, and Mandy Carter, eds., We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America (2012).