About
Ysidro Ramón Macías is a Chicano philosophy writer, organizer, attorney, and tortillero, originally from a farmworker family in the Salinas Valley of California. Macías was active in the Latino community of the Mission District in San Francisco, California, where he helped organize a Brown Beret chapter in 1968 and co-founded El Pocho Che, a political and literary arts magazine, in 1969. He also organized the MASC chapter at UC Berkeley in the spring of 1968. As chairperson of the Mexican-American Student Confederation (MASC), Macías would eventually lead efforts to open a second front for the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at UC Berkeley and become one of the co-chairpersons of the 1969 UC Berkeley TWLF strike.
Through his connections in the San Francisco Mission District Latino community, Macías was advised of the TWLF strike at San Francisco State University (SFSU). He connected with Roger Alvarado, a Guatemalan student leader of the Latino contingent at SFSU about opening a second TWLF front at UC Berkeley. In the winter quarter of 1969, Macías discussed the possibility with MASC members, but it was met with resistance, especially from those suspicious of non-Chicano groups.
After MASC voted against the proposition, Macías formed a committee consisting of MASC leadership, who consulted with Black, Asian, and Native student groups to assess their willingness to organize together. Macías reported his findings to MASC, where members eventually voted to open a second TWLF front and join the coalition. Macías and other strike leaders were targeted and brutally beaten by the police and National Guard. Fellow strikers recalled that after Macías was arrested and beaten unconscious, his head struck each concrete step as he was dragged up to Sproul Hall, where the University of California Police Department was located. For this incident, Macías was charged and convicted of a felony and sentenced to nine months in the Santa Rita County Jail. However, his conviction was eventually overturned after serving several months at Santa Rita.
After the strike, Macías briefly taught in the Chicano Studies Program at UC Berkeley, before becoming a Chicano Studies professor at Santa Clara, UC Irvine, Fresno City College, and Fresno State College. In 1973, he relocated to Fresno to found an alternative farmworker college called Universidad de Campesinos Libres, Inc. After this project died, he pursued a law degree in Fresno. As an attorney, Macías advocated for the legal and human rights of farmworkers throughout the San Joaquin Valley.
In 1990, Macías and his family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, and he eventually started Sinaloa Hawaiian Tortillas, a tortilla business. In 2012, Macías published his first book, The Compassion of the Feathered Serpent: A Chicano Worldview. Since then he has published three other books including Walking the Red Road on Chicanismo: Including Chicano Identity Teatro Plays, The Domingo Martinez Paredez Mayan Reader, and Creating a Chicana/o Red Road to Decolonization & Aztlan: ...a Roadmap Towards a Native Identity & Worldview.
As a Chicano philosophy writer, Macias has been one of the leading Chicano proponents of indigenismo since the early 1970’s. Indigenismo refers to the study and value of Mexico’s native population and the multiple native pueblos which constitute this population. He learned the native oral tradition from a Mexica maestro, Andres Segura Granados, the capitan-general de la danza, from 1972-1992. In his books, Macias promotes the Red Road as a spiritual/cultural alternative to Western Christian practices/values.
A firm believer in the power of a coalition, Macías believed that the unity of people of color played a significant factor in accomplishing a shared goal: the creation of an autonomous Department of Ethnic Studies. While Macías never anticipated that the creation of UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies would inspire similar programs and departments nationwide, the impact and legacy of the TWLF was profound. Macías maintains that for students of color, Ethnic Studies serves as a critical space to explore their identities and life purpose, understand their communities, and learn how to effect positive change in the world.