Brown Berets in Minnesota

The Brown Berets in Minnesota were a chapter of a national Chicano organization founded in Los Angeles in 1968. They emerged from the Mexican American barrio of Westside St. Paul and came together in 1969. Members took pride in their ethnic and racial identities as Chicanos while focusing on outreach to prevent Mexican American youth from engaging in criminalized activities.

The Chicano Movement was a set of radical ideas and pragmatic actions initiated by Mexican Americans across the US during the Civil Rights era. It sought to end racism and oppression through organizing, supporting neighborhood institutions, and making decisions based on local needs. In 1968, the Brown Berets in St. Paul took these ideas and applied them through youth-oriented community service and engagement with education, labor, and housing concerns based in the city’s West Side, the largest Mexican American barrio in the state.

Founded in Los Angeles a year earlier, the first Brown Beret chapter had sought to address the 120 years in which “the Chicano has suffered at the hands of the Gringo establishment.” Its document “Birth of a New Symbol,” used by St. Paul youth activists, details how the Brown Berets were established “To Serve To Observe and To Protect,” noting how “the Chicano” is “discriminated against in the schools, housing, employment and every other phase of life.”

The St. Paul Brown Berets focused on the local concerns of West Side neighborhood residents, especially Mexican youth. There were about fifty-five members at the group’s peak in the early 1970s (not including associates or advisors, who were often community elders). Since they tended to recruit from local West Side schools, their members were young, ranging from twelve to twenty-seven years old. Prominent members included Rudolph Saucedo, Gilbert de la O, Rose Zarate, Pete Zarate, James McKnight, and Lolo Castillo. While men seemed to dominate leadership and membership, women were an integral part of the organization even as their roles went largely unrecognized. In addition to Mexican Americans, there were “a few” Native American members and one Euro-American member.

The St. Paul Berets worked with a number of organizations in the Mexican American community. These included a social service group called Neighborhood House and a neighborhood clinic, referred to as La Clínca. From about 1969 to 1973 they helped organize youth-oriented and cultural events, including the Arts and Crafts Festival and an annual Christmas party at Neighborhood House. That event, which distributed donations like toys for children, was especially important to West Side residents, most of whom were Mexican Catholics.

The Berets ran a camping trip to Camp Owendigo in Woodbury, where they led a program for about fifty youth from the multiethnic West Side at a cost working-class families could afford. They helped establish a department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota, advocated for migrant workers, and cultivated cultural pride. In addition to providing juvenile delinquency intervention and education related to job-skill development, they organized tutoring and youth programs.

These youth- and working-class-focused goals—ensuring survival, mobility, and basic rights—contrasted with the ways the Berets were stigmatized as an extremist and criminal group by police, school leaders, and some of the more reactionary white and Mexican American community members of the previous generation. Some teachers and school leaders discouraged students from interacting with the Berets, and local newspapers conveyed a general fear and distrust. Some depicted them as a street gang. Local police frequently harassed and pulled over Brown Beret members, a practice that intensified an already common experience for many Mexican Americans.

This repression led to the St. Paul Brown Berets’ decline, which began in 1973. By then, many members were involved in other West Side and Chicano Movement organizations. As the decade progressed, they continued to build power and to expand opportunities for the Mexican American and broader Latino/a/x community in the Twin Cities.