Chino Garcia Obituary

While we were meeting at the GPUS national meeting in Chicago on Friday, July 24, one of the OGs (Original Greens) the American Green Party movement, Chino Garcia, passed away.

Forty-two years before, in St. Paul, Minnesota in August 1984, Chino participated in the first national Green organizing meeting where we agreed to start organizing a national network of local Green groups united around the Ten Key Values.

Chino was active in the New York City Greens’ initial organizing efforts in the mid-1980s. But as it became a contentious power struggle between mostly white factions of eco-anarchists, anti-left “Green Greens,” Yippies who tried to throw money around from their marijuana sales to buy influence, and others, Chino soon decided he had better things to do and continued to focus on CHARAS, his community organizatioin in the Puerto Rican community in Loisaida (the Lower East Side of Manhattan).

The remembrance below by his friend Dan Chodorkoff of the Institute for Social Ecology says more about Chino and CHARAS. Wikipedia has a good story about the remarkable community organizing and struggles of CHARAS.

I will just add that a number of us in the Greens continued to work with Chino even after he left the formal Green organization. In 1990, the Left Green Network, the Youth Greens, many local and regional Green organizations, and environmental groups like the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance, the National Toxics Coalition, and Earth First! organized an Earth Day Wall Street Action to counter the attempted corporate takeover of Earth Day that year. We got a lot more media coverage for our anti-corporate message than the corporate-sponsored Earth Day events that year. Chino contributed by opening up CHARAS’ community center, El Bohio, as a space for our organizing meetings, nonviolent direct action trainings, and a staging base on the day of the action.

¡Chino García, Presente!