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ning around drugged and naked in a false spirit of liberation andgoofing on the dirt-eating-poor Chicanos whom they considered "unhip." These same impoverished Chicanos--their live-down-theroad neighbors--who tried to scratch a living out of the earth, the earth that mocked their labor in the same way that the frivolous, wasteful behavior of the Anglo hipsters mocked their back-breaking lives, watched what they considered the hippies' debauchery and grew very angry.

This anger continued to smolder within, until it was given a chance for release by the fundamentalist Protestant preacher Reies Tijerina, who came from Texas to lead the first Brown Power uprising of the desperately poor in northern New Mexico during that summer of '67. This seizure of a whole county of land from the Anglos by Tijerina and his Alianza brothers and sisters gave the state's Chicano population a new pride in themselves as a people, and with that pride came a strong desire to strike out at these "young, white, longhaired punks" who taught the Chicano children to disrespect their parents and betray their Mexican-American traditions with talk of rock and roll music and free love.

The many tension-filled spots throughout the state suddenly exploded in a series of violent incidents in which the solitary were murdered and the together were raped and beaten. The situation continued and grew into an open war with the governor of the state publicly saying, "Yes!" to the Chicanos, giving them the Go sign to attack the longhairs for their arrogant life-style which was "bound to make anarchists of their Chicano young anyway." It went on like that until the longhairs armed and began defending themselves, and the war against the "outsiders" reached the stalemate it remains at this day. Only one or two incidents occur each year that ever make the front pages of the big city Albuquerque newspapers, which only thirty years ago were printed in Spanish.

Emmett wrote strongly in these articles about the then-developing situation in New Mexico, and through them tried to temper the arrogance of a group of transient white children who thought flowers were lovely and poverty still an adventure. He never knew if any of the things he wrote had any effect on the migration of longhairs to the Southwest, but he did discover that the Chicanos who lived in the Mission district of San Francisco responded favorably to his reports, and it was eventually through those very sanle few words he wrote on white pieces of paper that he met and joined some of the [end page 383]