The Brown Berets grew out of Young Citizens for Community Action, a church-supported East Los Angeles youth group that David Sánchez and others transformed — under the pressure of constant police harassment at their coffeehouse, La Piranya — into a disciplined, uniformed organization modeled loosely on the Black Panthers. Their ten-point program demanded an end to police brutality, decent schools and housing, and the return of stolen lands.
Chapters spread to dozens of cities across the Southwest, running free clinics — the East L.A. Free Clinic was largely Beret-built — breakfast programs, and the newspaper La Causa. From the first march, sheriff's deputies and the LAPD's intelligence squads treated the Berets as an enemy formation, seeding them with the informers and provocateurs who would shape every prosecution to come.