Mexican Americans/Chicana/os/Chicanx form a majority of the overall Latino population in the United States. In this collection, established and emerging Chicanx researchers diverge from the discipline's traditional Southwest focus to offer academic and non-academic perspectives specifically on the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. Their multidisciplinary papers address colonialism, gender, history, immigration, labor, literature, sociology, education, and religion, setting the Chicanx movement and experience beyond customary scholarship and illuminating how Chicanxs have challenged racialization, marginalization, and isolation in the northern borderlands. Contributors: Norma Cardenas and Rachel Maldonado, retired (both Eastern Wash. Univ.), the late Carlos Maldonado, Oscar Rosales Castaneda (activist, writer), Josue Q. Estrada (Univ. of Wash.), Theresa Melendez, emeritus, Dylan Miner, and Dionicio Valdes (all Mich. St. Univ.), and Ernesto Todd Mireles (Prescott College).
Mexican Americans/Chicana/os/Chicanx form a majority of the overall Latino population in the United States. In this collection, established and emerging Chicanx researchers diverge from the discipline’s traditional Southwest focus to offer academic and non-academic perspectives specifically on the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest. Their multidisciplinary papers address colonialism, gender, history, immigration, labor, literature, sociology, education, and religion, setting El Movimiento (the Chicanx movement) and the Chicanx experience beyond customary scholarship and illuminating how Chicanxs have challenged racialization, marginalization, and isolation in the northern borderlands. Contributors to We Are Aztlan! include Norma Cardenas (Eastern Washington University), Oscar Rosales Castaneda (activist, writer), Josue Q. Estrada (University of Washington), Theresa Melendez (Michigan State University, emeritus), the late Carlos Maldonado, Rachel Maldonado (Eastern Washington University, retired), Dylan Miner (Michigan State University), Ernesto Todd Mireles (Prescott College), and Dionicio Valdes (Michigan State University). Winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.
A collection of articles, poems and book excerpts reflecting the Chicano heritage and culture, and the modern problems and struggles of Mexican-Americans.
"Creating Aztlâan interrogates the important role of Aztlâan in Chicano and Indigenous art and culture. Using the idea that lowriding is an Indigenous way of being, author Dylan A. T. Miner (Mâetis) discusses the multiple roles that Aztlâan has played atvarious moments in time, engaging pre-colonial indigeneities, alongside colonial, modern, and contemporary Xicano responses to colonization"--
During the Chicano Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of Aztlán, homeland of the ancient Aztecs, served as a unifying force in an emerging cultural renaissance. Does the term remain useful? This expanded new edition of the classic 1989 collection of essays about Aztlán weighs its value. To encompass new developments in the discourse the editors have added six new essays.
Thirteen Chicano scholars draw upon their personal experiences and expertise to paint a vivid, colorful portrait of what it means to be a Chicano. "We have come a long way," says Arnulfo D. Trejo, editor of this volume, "from the time when the Mexicano silently accepted the stereotype drawn of him by the outsider." He identifies himself as a Chicano, and his "promised land" is Aztlán, home of the ancient Aztecs, which now provides spiritual unity and a vision of the future for Chicanos. In these twelve original compositions, says Trejo, "our purpose is not to talk to ourselves, but to open a dialogue among all concerned people." The personal reactions to Chicano women's struggles, political experiences, bicultural education and history provide a wealth of information for laymen as well as scholars. In addition, the book provides the most complete recorded definition of the Chicano Movement, what it has accomplished, and its goals for the future. Contributors: Fausto Avendaño Roberto R. Bacalski-Martínez David Ballesteros José Antonio Burciaga Rudolph O. de la Garza Ester Gallegos y Chávez Sylvia Alicia Gonzales Manuel H. Guerra Guillermo Lux Martha A. Ramos Reyes Ramos Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez Maurilio E. Vigil
Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jóse Gamaliel González, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, González looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home. Born near Monterey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, González studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s. With numerous illustrations, this book portrays González's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, and his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.
A collection of writings that explores the experiences of Mexican-Americans during the Vietnam War, both on the warfront and at home; featuring over sixty short stories, poems, speeches, and articles.
Aztlán Arizona is a history of the Chicano Movement in Arizona in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on community and student activism in Phoenix and Tucson, Darius V. Echeverría ties the Arizona events to the larger Chicano and civil rights movements against the backdrop of broad societal shifts that occurred throughout the country. Arizona’s unique role in the movement came from its (public) schools, which were the primary source of Chicano activism against the inequities in the judicial, social, economic, medical, political, and educational arenas. The word Aztlán, originally meaning the legendary ancestral home of the Nahua peoples of Mesoamerica, was adopted as a symbol of independence by Chicano/a activists during the movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In an era when poverty, prejudice, and considerable oppositional forces blighted the lives of roughly one-fifth of Arizonans, the author argues that understanding those societal realities is essential to defining the rise and power of the Chicano Movement. The book illustrates how Mexican American communities fostered a togetherness that ultimately modified larger Arizona society by revamping the educational history of the region. The concluding chapter outlines key Mexican American individuals and organizations that became politically active in order to address Chicano educational concerns. This Chicano unity, reflected in student, parent, and community leadership organizations, helped break barriers, dispel the Mexican American inferiority concept, and create educational change that benefited all Arizonans. No other scholar has examined the emergence of Chicano Movement politics and its related school reform efforts in Arizona. Echeverría’s thorough research, rich in scope and interpretation, is coupled with detailed and exact endnotes. The book helps readers understand the issues surrounding the Chicano Movement educational reform and ethnic identity. Equally important, the author shows how residual effects of these dynamics are still pertinent today in places such as Tucson.
Does the achievement of economic equality in a multiethnic society require the complete loss of a minority's cultural identity? Beyond Aztlan argues that American society has historically viewed a distinctive cultural identity as something that an ethnic group gives up in order to achieve economic and political parity. Mexican Americans, who have scored limited gains in their struggle for equality since the 1940s, are proving to be no exception to the rule. However, Barrera compares the situation of Mexican Americans to that of minority groups in four other countries and concludes that equality does not necessarily require assimilation.
