Here is a call, a most urgent call, for Rainbow Warriors: something ancient, something new. - Elizabeth Martínez

The most striking change during the past 20 years can be seen in attitudes toward homophobia. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an almost total silence hung over gay and lesbian advocacy. No openly gay person could be a movement leader. Today homophobia persists; most progressive, straight Chicanos as well as Chicanas still fail to see gay and lesbian rights as another struggle of other oppressed people. Too many still fail to see homophobia as a sometimes murderous force of discrimination. But the situation has improved, especially in some major cities, in academia and among youth.

In the long run, we need global changes in today's economic policies and the supra-national agencies like the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, that determine them. For the short run, we need to define immigrant and refugee rights as a civil rights issue around which all of us should unite. At the same time, immigrant rights are broader than civil rights. Malcolm X once pointed out that the Black movement of the 1960s was a struggle for human rights, not just civil rights. In a similar way, we need to see that the struggle for immigrant rights is in fact a struggle for both civil and human rights.

The fact is, nothing could be more truly Chicana than the Chicana who wants to be more than a wife, mother, housekeeper. That limited concept of women did not exist under our Indian ancestors for whom the woman was a creative person in the broadest sense and central to the cultural life of the tribe. Later in Mexican history, we find that the woman has played every possible role-including that of fighter on the front lines.