Maria Varela and Luis Zapata joined SNCC in 1963, pre-dating the 1964 “Freedom Summer” and Elizabeth Mártinez came to Mississippi in 1964. Having each come to SNCC for different reasons, the three activists were joining what was, at the time, the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement. The group was driven by students and young people and engaged in the direct action techniques that other civil rights groups hesitated to use. Founded in 1960 at Shaw University, with the guiding principles of nonviolence rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, SNCC was originally envisioned as a “channel of communication for the student movement.” Historians have remembered SNCC as being young, black and white activists from the Northeast and Southeast. However, the experience of Varela, Mártinez, and Zapata suggests that, in the early years, SNCC’s organizing model appealed to people from diverse backgrounds including activists from the labor movement, older people, people from the West and Southwest United States, and Latino/as. SNCC, which embraced inclusiveness in its early years, grew increasingly closed off and unable incorporate racially liminal subjects. When SNCC forced categorization of white or black, Mártinez and Varela were deemed white and were expelled from SNCC.
...the organization, led by a group working out of the “Atlanta Project,” agreed that “white activists needed to organize in the white community” and that black activists would organize in the black community. They maintained that whites organizing in their communities could still work under the banner of SNCC. However, months later, in December 1966, the SNCC staff met again at the New York estate of black entertainer Peg Leg Bates, where the decision was made, as Mártinez described it, to “expel white staff members.”
...While Zapata left SNCC before the battle over the role of whites in the movement took place, both Mártinez and Varela were deeply affected by the changing nature of SNCC. Writing many years later, Mártinez’s memory was increasingly focused on her identification as Chicana and the improper classification of her and Maria Varela as white during the expulsion. She wrote “as far as anyone seems to remember, we [Varela and herself] were classified as white, even though I did not consider myself either white or black.”
Writing after the Kingston Springs decision to expel whites, Mártinez defended whites put in a seemingly impossible position. “How could they defend themselves,” she asked, “when attacked for their whiteness.” Like Varela’s earlier discussion of white womanhood, Mártinez use of “they” and “them” in reference to whites suggests she saw herself as racially nonwhite, even if those in SNCC disagreed. She wrote: “From time to time, the question of whether I was to be classified as white or Mexican (i.e., non-white) has come up in SNCC. People talked about me but never asked me what I considered myself.” She goes on to make clear that she has always identified as Mexican, and therefore nonwhite. However, in SNCC she found her self reclassified. “One day,” she went on, “I found myself unable to vote in SNCC because I was ‘white.’”
Cecilia Márquez, “The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the US South, 1940–2000,” PhD thesis, University of Virginia (2016)
