"Equal Medical Care for All": Chicana and Chicano Health Activism in Late 1960s Los Angeles

The East Los Angeles Health Task Force (ELAHTF) was formed in the late 1960s by a group of community members and health-oriented organizations that wanted the Chicano community to have a voice in determining their health care options. ELAHTF members viewed health care access as a Civil Rights issue, focusing their efforts on the humanization of medical care for a community whose only medical facility was the large and impersonal Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. ELAHTF members utilized President Lyndon B. Johnson's belief that improving health care in urban cities was one way to attack human poverty. During a period of widespread social activism the organization took to their typewriters rather than the street applying for federal grants—which were abundant for health care solutions under the legislation of the War on Poverty—to create innovative health care programs. Health activism during “The Movement” era deserves more scholarly attention and organizations such as the ELAHTF are worthy of a place alongside other important groups that struggled for social justice such during the 1960s and 1970s such as the Comisión Femenil, Centro de Acción Social Autónomo and the Brown Berets. This paper hopes to bring public health advocates in East Los Angeles such as David H. Lara to the forefront of social movement scholarship. Lara believed that health facilities should be controlled by community residents and should respond to their individual needs regardless of their ability to pay. Chicano-run clinics and hospitals were one of the goals that he and the ELAHTF advocated. However significant these attempts the question this paper will address is whether the ELAHTF had a long lasting impact on improved health care that helped reshape the politics of health care and patient advocacy.