In the Spirit of a New People: The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Movement 9780814738887

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In the Spirit of a New People

In the Spirit of a New People The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Movement

randy j. ontiveros

a New York University Press new york and london

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2014 by New York University All rights reserved L i b r a ry o f C o n g r e s s C ata l o g i n g - i n - P u b l i c at i o n Data

Ontiveros, Randy J. In the spirit of a new people : the cultural politics of the Chicano movement / Randy J. Ontiveros. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8147-3884-9 (hardback : acid-free paper) ISBN 978-0-8147-3877-1 (paperback : acid-free paper) 1. Chicano movement. 2. United States—Social conditions—1960–1980. 3. Mexican Americans—Social conditions. 4. Mexican Americans—Politics and government. 5. Mexican American art. 6. Social movements in art. I. Title. E184.M5O58 2013 973’.046872—dc23 2013017724 References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 2 3 4

vii

Introduction: The Art and History of the Chicano Movement

1

Antennas and Mimeograph Machines: Postwar Mass Media and the Chicano/a Street Press

44

Green Aztlán: Environmentalism and the Chicano/a Visual Arts

86

Immigrant Actos: Citizenship and Performance in El Teatro Campesino

131

After Words: Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo and the Evolution of Chicano/a Cultural Politics

170

Notes

197

Index

227

About the Author

234

Acknowledgments

I am grateful beyond measure to the many people who have helped me to write this book and to arrive at the joyful place I am today. To those named below and to the many more unnamed, thank you. To my teachers: Ms. Borges; Mr. Walton; Mr. Goldstein; Ms. Kemp; Mr. Mikolavich; Tim Caron; Todd Pickett; Lindon Barrett (que en paz descanse); Leo Chavez; Julia Lupton; Steven Mailloux; Jennifer Terry; and Brook Thomas. I owe a lifelong debt to Dr. Virginia Doland, who opened the doors to graduate school. Thank you especially to Inderpal Grewal, Laura Kang, Rafael Pérez-Torres, and John Carlos Rowe. Your brilliant writing, practical advice, and engaged teaching are an example I try to emulate in my own career. To my friends: Jeff Culver and Shari Culver, Jason McMartin and Kelly McMartin, Nancy Felch and Andrew Felch, Brian Thill, Linh Hua, Tad Davies and Rebecca Summerhays, Janet Neary, Jane Griffin, Alex Espinoza, Priya Shah, Naomi Greyser, Amy Parsons, Jane Hseu, Arnold Pan, Larisa Castillo, I-Lien Tsay, Mariam Lam, Johanna Wyers, Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Rachel Howard and Chris Kirages, Tim Hackman, and Mietek Boduszyński. To those who gave help along the way: Alfredo Arreguín; Santa Barraza; Greg Rubio; Modesta and José Treviño; Maria Varela; Dionne Espinoza; George Mariscal; Kandice Chuh; Mimi Thi Nguyen; Ricardo Ortiz; Tony López; Joseph Palacios; Laura Halperin; Rodrigo Lazo; Elena Machado Sáez; Ricky Rodríguez; Eduardo Díaz; Los Blogueros; Marisela Norte; the staff of the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archive; the

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staff of the Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M; the staff and editors of American Quarterly; and the amazing people at NYU Press, including my anonymous reviewers, Tim Roberts, Susan Murray, Ciara McLaughlin, Alicia Nadkarni, and Eric Zinner. To my students, past and present: Kara Morillo, Elise Auvil, Ana Perez, Maria Vargas, Fernando Benavidez, Allison Abessinio, Seth Horton, Anne-Marie Robinson, Erica Gruenewald, Ana Farach, Kelly Singleton, Rebecca Wise, Toni Sabo, Nina Candia, Kate Richard, Michael Casiano, Anna Steed, and all the students I have had the pleasure to teach. To my colleagues: At Maryland I have been surrounded by a fantastic staff in the English Department, and by wonderful colleagues across the campus. I owe particular thanks to John Auchard, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, Ralph Bauer, Jackson Bryer, Charles Caramello, Kent Cartwright, Sandra Cypess, Bill Cohen, Theresa Coletti, Perla Guerrero, Christina Hanhardt, Sheila Jelen, Linda Kauffman, Bob Levine, Marilee Lindemann, Peter Mallios, Zita Nunes, Carla Peterson, Sangeeta Ray, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Laura Rosenthal, Jason Rudy, Martha Nell Smith, Nancy Struna, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Mary Helen Washington, Edlie Wong, and David Wyatt. To my family: Thank you to my familia near and far, and above all to Steve and Julie Ontiveros, to Max and Angel and Aubrey, to John and Suzanne Sellars, to Francie Koehler (M2!), to Randy Ontiveros, for always being there, and to Patricia Garrett, for guiding my steps. To Danny and Annelise: Since you came into my life, not a single day has passed without me feeling overwhelmed by joy and gratitude for the privilege of being your Dad. I hope you will tuck this book away on a shelf somewhere, and when you see its spine, remember that my heart makes its home where you are, now and always. I love you. To Jennifer Cay: Your fierce love, goofy humor, sharp mind, and deep reservoirs of wisdom are my life’s great treasure. Every word of every sentence of every paragraph of every page of this book owes a debt to you.

Introduction: The Art and History of the Chicano Movement

What significance does the Chicano movement have today? This question is at the heart of the book you hold in your hands, but it is not an easy one to ask, let alone to answer. Many people have never heard of the Chicano movement, a nationwide campaign during the 1960s and after for the civil rights of Mexican Americans. Some individuals faintly recall the movement from brief mention of it in the pages of their high school or college textbooks, while others know of the movement, but don’t believe it holds any relevance in their lives. Progressives often celebrate the Chicano movement as an important part of the American Left, though they are sometimes critical of the direction it took. Conservatives, on the other hand, are generally ignorant of this history. Those few who do know a little about the movement are scornful. When Jorge Bustamante ran for governor in California’s 1999 recall election, right-wing activists accused the one-time movement leader of being party to an elaborate Reconquista (Reconquest) plot to take over the American Southwest and return it to Mexico. Theirs was a fringe view, but its coverage in the press prompted one of the more sustained public discussions of the Chicano movement in recent years. Like other movements and memorabilia associated with the 1960s, the Chicano movement is often presented as a morning’s half-remembered dream that fades as the day goes on. This book offers the reader a different picture. It shows the image of a social movement that transformed American society and culture. The process was imperfect and

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the motivations of the people involved were complex, but progressive Chicano/a activism of the postwar period improved the lives of Mexican Americans and bettered the nation as a whole. And the movement is not over. Old struggles still reverberate, and new struggles have emerged. The rights of immigrant women and men were earlier treated as an auxiliary issue in the Chicano movement; now they are the movement’s most pressing concern. During the 1960s and 1970s, gays and lesbians often felt compelled to compartmentalize their activism. As Gloria Anzaldúa recalls in This Bridge Called My Back: “Years ago, a roommate of mine fighting for gay rights told MAYO, a Chicano organization, that she and the president were gay. They were ostracized. When they left, MAYO fell apart.”1 Homophobia forced activists to draw lines between the work they did toward racial equality and the work they did for sexual freedom. In the twenty-first century, queer issues are a visible and vital part of Chicano/a politics. Art—a term this book defines in the traditional sense to mean the entire range of human creative forms—affords a unique perspective on the contemporary meanings of the Chicano movement.2 This is partly a matter of institutional history. Unlike the African American civil rights movement, the Chicano movement won no direct legislative victories in the postwar decades. However, Chicano/a cultural expression of the period has been well received in many corners of the U.S. culture industry, including museums and galleries, corporate and independent publishing houses, colleges and universities, and theater venues. These institutions have kept the images, narratives, performances, and ideas of midcentury Chicano/a activism in circulation, and they have also sponsored new forms of politically engaged art. Historiography, or the writing of history, gives us yet another reason to look to art as a way of understanding the Chicano movement. From the perspective of traditional history, the past always is receding from the here and now, and as it withdraws, its lessons get dimmer. This is especially true of those events deemed “minor” or “failed” by history’s chroniclers, who often see such events as marginal in the narrative of how a society arrives at its present. Art possesses a different chronology. It is governed not by linear time but rather by the imagination, and therefore it is often more attuned to the subtle ways in which the past shapes the present. Also, because art revolves around the senses, it allows individuals and collectives to feel their relationship to the past more intimately. Chicano/a art takes on yet another political dimension when one considers that Mexican Americans and other Latinos/as in the United States

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are frequently represented by the mass media as numbers. This dynamic deserves close attention, because it helps frame the contemporary relevance of the Chicano movement. It also underlines the value of art in thinking differently about progressive Chicano/a politics.

The Limits of Demographic Thinking In what has become something of a national ritual, the Census Bureau every ten years releases new data about Hispanics in the United States. Magazines and newspapers then use this data as the foundation of frequently melodramatic stories about a changing America. Data in the 1980 census showed approximately 14.6 million people “of Spanish/Hispanic origin” in the United States, an apparent jump of 61 percent since 1970.3 Questions about terminology led to a debate among experts about the accuracy of these figures, but many business and government leaders were nevertheless willing to make pronouncements. Several major American corporations seized the 1980 census as an opportunity to refine their niche marketing strategies, sometimes with the help of newly formed Hispanic ad agencies that positioned themselves as native informants. The Coors Brewing Company, for example, declared the 1980s the “Decade of the Hispanic.” Not coincidentally, it did so only a few years after Chicano/a activists had ended their boycott against the company for its discriminatory hiring practices.4 Politicians responded with similar zeal. Told by the consultant class that Latinos/as are a tradition-minded people, the GOP tried to portray itself as the party of family, faith, and country. In 1984, Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign launched the Hispanic Victory Initiative, a nationwide get-out-the-vote effort. Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy and other Democratic leaders renewed their attention to civil rights issues and appealed to the memory of John F. Kennedy, whose “Viva Kennedy” clubs had been a political boot camp for many Mexican American voters. A Washington Post headline from August 1983 captures the breathless rhetoric that often surrounds discussion of Latino/a demographics: “Hispanics, Seen as Pivotal 1984 Voters, Courted by Both Parties.”5 Census 1990 showed a further expansion of Latino/a populations in the United States, and it was met with similar excitement by the press. The Hispanic population had grown by 50 percent since 1980, compared to only 6 percent for non-Hispanics. Nearly 40 percent of Hispanics had marked “Other” as their racial designation, compared to less than 1 percent of the non-Hispanic population.6 These numbers formed part

4 / introduction

of the backstory to Time magazine’s well-known 1993 “New Face of America” issue, which used computer-simulation software to produce an olive-skinned woman described as an image of “How Immigrants Are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society.”7 The editors of Time offered a naïve gloss on racial politics at the end of the twentieth century. However, Census 1990 did prompt the federal government to change its approach to managing racial difference. In November 1993, Congress held subcommittee hearings to discuss the most recent census data. It was not the first time that Latino/a populations had posed a problem for demographers. The category “Mexican” had been added in 1930, only to be removed in 1940.8 But the pace and scale of Latino/a population growth in 1990 seemed to call for a rethinking of the nation’s historically black-and-white racial imagination. After entertaining the addition of “Hispanic” as a distinct racial category from “white,” “black or negro,” “American Indian,” and “Asian or Pacific Islander,” administrators decided to keep it as a separate ethnic marker for the millenial census. As Clara E. Rodríguez observes, the 2000 survey marked the first time in the two-hundred-year history of the national census that respondents were allowed to select more than one racial group.9 Officials hoped to prevent the frequent undercounting of minority populations, and also to bring Hispanics in line with conventional racial categories. Mass media responded with predictable sensationalism to Census 2000. According to the data, there had been a 50 percent increase in the “Spanish/Hispanic/Latino” population during the 1990s, from 22.4 million in the previous census, to 35.3 million in 2000. By comparison, the non-Hispanic population grew at a rate of 13.2 percent. Latinos/as were reportedly younger as well: 35 percent of Hispanics were under eighteen, compared to 25.7 percent of the population as a whole.10 Following the release of this data, USA Today reported that “a booming economy” in the 1990s led to “a surge in the Hispanic population far beyond anyone’s expectations.” It also noted a “surprising Hispanic population growth” in places like Georgia, Nevada, Arkansas, and Iowa.11 The truth is that these regions have long been home to sizable communities of Mexican Americans and other Latinos/as, but the presence of these populations has been obscured by stubborn mythologies of a white heartland in the middle of the United States. Collective faith in these mythologies has only served to intensify the melodrama surrounding the national growth of Latino/a populations. After the 2010 census, the Christian Science Monitor reported that “white Americans are still the majority in the United States, but they’re

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rapidly being overtaken by Hispanics.”12 This rhetoric of competition had appeared seven years prior, when the Census Bureau announced in January 2003 that Hispanics had replaced African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. In a front-page article headlined “Hispanics Now Largest Minority, Census Shows,” Lynette Clemetson of the New York Times reported that “Hispanics have edged past blacks” as a result of “the explosive growth in the Hispanic population.” The St. Petersburg Times called it “a multicultural milestone,” and London’s Guardian newspaper said it was “a symbolic shift in the country’s racial landscape.”13 Media coverage tends to sentimentalize, rather than illuminate, the complex relationship between African American and Latinos/as. During the past two decades, the growing numbers of Latinos/as living in historically black urban areas has led to grassroots coalition-building, including Latino/a involvement with the environmental-justice organization Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, and African American support for the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.14 Sadly, it has also sometimes created mutual suspicion and occasional conflict, with African Americans accusing Latinos/as of taking scarce job opportunities, and Latinos/as accusing blacks of laziness and criminality. The latter is particularly troublesome, because it builds on a decades-long pattern in U.S. immigration history. As Toni Morrison said of immigration in her contribution to the 1993 Time special issue on race, “the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens.”15 Morrison’s commentary reveals one of the central problems in coverage of the quantitative changes taking place in the United States: appeals to the growing power of Latinos/ as as consumers and as voters are too often tainted by an implicit and denigrating comparison to blacks.16 Magazine and newspaper reporting on Latino/a demographics has been accompanied by widespread television commentary, including special programs such as Soledad O’Brien’s Latino in America, which aired on CNN in October 2009.17 Without question, much good has come out of this media coverage. Together with changes on the ground, it has compelled educational, political, legal, religious, and commercial institutions to expand their outreach and, in some cases, to reflect on their mission. Large corporations and small businesses continue to see Latinos/as as an emerging market. In a consumer capitalist economy, this perception inevitably translates into meaningful social power, as evidenced by the fact that the widespread availability of bilingual signage, packaging,

6 / introduction

advertising, and customer service has made Spanish into a second lingua franca—no small change, considering the persistent efforts to stamp out the language across much of U.S. history.18 Demographic changes, and media coverage of those changes, have likewise prompted government agencies and educational institutions to increase their Latino/a outreach. In 1976, Governor Robert Ray of Iowa established the Spanish-Speaking People’s Commission and charged it with coordinating services for the state’s expanding Latino/a population. Reorganized in 2011 as the Office of Latino Affairs, the agency connects residents with citizenship classes, English-language learning, scholarships and youth activities, and health services.19 Similar efforts have been reproduced in cities, counties, and states across the United States. In August 2009, Sonia Sotomayor became the first Latina confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court. President Barack Obama’s decision to nominate Sotomayor reflected her impressive qualifications as a jurist, but it also reflected the importance of the Latino/a electorate, especially in swing states such as North Carolina, Colorado, and Florida. These efforts by government officials run parallel to the efforts of educators. Colleges and universities are creating interdisciplinary programs in Chicano/a and Latino/a studies. There are now more than seventy Latino/a studies programs across the United States, many of them formed after 1990.20 Traditional disciplines such as English, history, sociology, Spanish, and political science are revising their curricula to include Latino/a content. Primary and secondary schools are changing as well. Author and journalist Héctor Tobar tells an inspiring anecdote of how one school in Dalton, Georgia, responded to the growing number of Mexicans moving there to work in the city’s carpet industry. Instead of isolating their Latino/a students, leaders at Roan Street Elementary School used the population shift as a learning opportunity and sent veteran teachers to Mexico for summer language and culture training.21 The demographic shifts of the past several decades have undoubtedly changed how institutions in the United States relate to Latino/a communities, and mass media coverage, for all of its sensationalism, has likely accelerated this process. To the extent that it helps alleviate human suffering, activists are wise to ground their demands for social justice on census data. Numbers, though, are never enough. They must be accompanied by narrative, and too often the numbers are used to tell mistaken and even misleading narratives about Latinos/as. The most obvious example of this dynamic is the way that census figures are put in service of a narrative that says that Latino/a population growth is undermining

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American culture. Otto Santa Ana argues that in the early 1990s, journalists began to replace old metaphors of Latinos/as as a “sleeping giant” with a mixture of military- and health-related metaphors of invasion and disease.22 These media metaphors became an essential ingredient in a racialized anti-immigrant movement that has positioned Latinos/as as a new and corrosive element, rather than as a long-established and valuable part of America. The United States has been home to anti-immigration campaigns in the past. They typically follow a boom-and-bust pattern: when the economy is doing well, natives mostly ignore the underpaid immigrants who keep prices down; when the economy shrinks, many natives scapegoat immigrants, accusing them of stealing jobs and freeloading. The antiimmigrant movement of the 1990s was unique, though, in that it led to the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border on an unprecedented scale.23 After the Cold War ended in 1989, the interest groups that together make up what Republican President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” needed a new enemy to justify the Pentagon’s massive budget. They found it at the Rio Grande. Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996) argued that with the war between capitalism and communism over, the future would be dominated by conflict between several “civilizational identities.”24 Mexican migrants played an important role in Huntington’s narrative because they marked for him the incursion of the “Latin American” civilization into the “Western” civilization of the United States. Huntington claimed that Latin America was an “offspring of European civilization” that had become “a corporatist, authoritarian culture,” and he warned that if the number of Latino/s in the United States continued to rise, then “revanchist sentiments” among Mexican migrants and their children could endanger “the results of American military expansion in the nineteenth century.”25 Huntington’s argument was soundly discredited by intellectuals with a more accurate understanding of the patterns of exchange and migration in world history, but it continues to animate the bellicose border policy of the United States. Even though the recession that began in 2008 brought migration from Latin America to a virtual halt, politicians and pundits continue to conjure up fears of “illegal aliens” exploiting the nation’s “broken borders.”26 Recent media coverage of Latino/a demographics has reinforced a misconception that sometime in the not-too-distant past, Latinos/as either weren’t in the United States, or they were invisible. This narrative is as politically damaging as it is historically inaccurate. In 1565, Spanish

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explorers founded Florida’s St. Augustine, the first permanent European settlement in what would become the United States. In 1570, thirty years before the English settlement of Jamestown, eight Jesuit priests and an acculturated Algonquian known as Luis de Velasco explored the James River and the Chesapeake Bay in the hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific.27 In 1598, Juan de Oñate established a major colony in presentday New Mexico. His legacy, like that of other Spanish colonizers, is complex: he brutalized the indigenous communities of the region, but he also established relations that would allow for the preservation of native traditions. During the early 1800s, Moses Austin, Sam Houston, Abel Stearns, and other undocumented Anglo-America immigrants had to depend on these mestizo (mixed) Indian and Spanish populations for information on how to survive in the arid regions of what was then northern Mexico. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Texas, and parts of Colorado and Oklahoma did not join the United States until the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended la invasión norteamericana (or the North American invasion, as it is known in Mexico), and turned tens of thousands of Mexicans into American citizens almost overnight. Puerto Rico was made an American territory in 1903 after the Spanish-American War, and Puerto Ricans have been citizens of the United States since the passage of the Jones Act in 1917. The line connecting these colonial histories to contemporary Latino/a demographics is admittedly a crooked one. Many Latinos/as arrived in the United States after the liberalization of U.S. immigration law in 1965. Also, some members of the heritage Latino/a populations in the United States identified as European and white, even when they had been born in the Americas and had darker skin than the typical northern European. These individuals, many of whom were elites, went to great lengths to distance themselves from the stigma of being brown, including the development of an elaborate casta (caste) system in which skin tone was explicitly linked to social status. Some of their descendants still try to secure the privileges of whiteness by distancing themselves from recent migrants and from darker-skinned Latinos/as.28 Nevertheless, the long history of Spanish-speaking peoples within the boundaries of the contemporary United States undoes the media’s census-driven narrative, which suggests that the nation has only recently had substantive contact with Latin America, its histories, its languages, and its peoples. The truth is that the relationship of the United States to the rest of the Americas has been as central to its history as its relationship with Europe.

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One of the many lessons worth learning from movement activism of the 1960s and 1970s is how to make public demands for social justice without appealing exclusively to the neoliberal framework of population, voting power, and market force. Quantitative frameworks can be strategically useful, but their historical and political imagination is restrictive in that it tends to be both presentist and profit-motivated. The combination of the Bracero guest worker program, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, economic turmoil in Mexico, and higher fertility rates led to an increase in the size of the Mexican American population during the 1960s and 1970s. Chicano/a activists never grounded their appeals on changing demographics, though. They knew the numbers, and they were aware of their significance. In 1970, Mexican American activists convinced the Census Bureau to ask a subgroup of respondents if they were “of Spanish origin.” This led eventually to the multiple-race option of Census 2000.29 Data, though, was not front and center in the minds of postwar activists. What anchored the political imagination of movement activists was a twin commitment to preserving the rich traditions of the past and winning social equality in the future. This commitment—also the ideological and practical center of movement art—was not animated by the relative size of the population. It was animated instead by a radical belief in human dignity as the basis of public policy. A comparison of recent rhetoric with the rhetoric of the 1960s illustrates the shifting frame of progressive Chicano/a politics. In 2006, immigrant-rights activists organized a series of highly successful nationwide protests against House Resolution 4437, the Republican-led effort to extend border fencing, increase employer penalties, criminalize aid to migrants, and make undocumented border crossing a criminal (rather than civil) offense. Speaking about the scheduled May Day boycotts of that year, Oscar Sanchez of the March 25th Coalition told the New York Times: “We don’t want to hurt the United States economically. . . . We want to show them the buying power of the immigrant consumer. . . . We are flexing our economic power to gain political power.”30 His language of dollars and cents is a common trope in the fight for a humane immigration policy. Sergio Arau’s film A Day Without a Mexican (2004) comically imagines what would happen if Mexican labor in California suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. It represents Latinos/as as a kind of “invisible hand” powering the U.S. economy. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, a political mentoring program founded in 1978, says that “with the dramatic growth in the Latino population and future workforce needs, it is imperative that

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we significantly increase the number of Latinos ready to assume leadership positions in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.”31 Similar language is used by the Southwest Voter Registration Project, a nonpartisan organization created by movement activist and Medal of Freedom winner William C. Velasquez. The organization says its mobilization efforts are needed because of the “growing clout of Latino voters.”32 These metaphors of economy and demography are conspicuously absent from the major documents of the Chicano movement. Instead one usually finds rhetorical appeals to history and to moral principle. The “Plan of Delano,” the stirring manifesto of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and an essential document of the Chicano movement, is representative in this respect. Written in 1966, the document was read aloud by Luis Valdez during the union’s pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento. It begins with a preamble that combines American political rhetoric and Catholic ritual: We, the undersigned, gathered in Pilgrimage to the capital of the State in Sacramento in penance for all the failings of Farm Workers as free and sovereign men, do solemnly declare before the civilized world which judges our actions, and before the nation to which we belong, the propositions we have formulated to end the injustice that oppresses us.33 Contemporary political discourse about Latinos/as generally measures their value in terms of the profits to be made from their purchases, or the power to be gained from their votes. The “Plan of Delano” grounds itself in the intrinsic worth of the “free and sovereign” individual, and also in the collective conscience of “the civilized world which judges our actions.” Political philosophers have criticized language of this sort as the residue of a naïve, and even imperialistic, European liberalism. The Delano manifesto’s use of the sexist pronoun “men” confirms the practical limits of liberalism, but the courage this document gave its farmworker audiences, and the central role it played in union victories, also shows the radical power that still resides in concepts of individual autonomy and civic responsibility—especially when those concepts are taken up by persons who have historically been denied their potential. The “Plan of Delano” also possesses a different sense of time and temporality than contemporary rhetoric, which generally revolves around the place of Latinos/as in the future of the United States. Nativist paranoia says that the growing Latino/a demography will make America unrecognizable; Latinos/as and their allies claim these demographic changes

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as the basis of a new and better United States. The “Plan of Delano” sees justice for past grievances as the path to a better future: Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. . . . They saw the obvious effects of an unjust system, starvation wages, contractors, day hauls, forced migration, sickness, and sub-human living conditions, and acted as if they were irremediable causes. The farm worker has been abandoned to his own fate—without representation, without power—subject to the mercy and caprice of the rancher.34 This rhetoric represents an important contrast to the neoliberal rhetoric that dominates the public sphere. Since the 1970s, wealth in the United States and across much of the globe has been moving from the public trust to private interests, and from the lower- and middle-classes to the upper classes. Several overlapping factors are driving this shift: declining union membership; the exporting of manufacturing; low tax rates for high-income earners and for capital gains; the offshoring of corporate profits; and the deregulation of the financial industry. Individuals and communities increasingly rely on the private sector for schools, roads, and other goods and services once supplied by government, and because they do, they are compelled to speak the language of the free market. The vacuous language of marketers and corporate executives overruns the public sphere: university administrators speak of “efficiencies” and “entrepreneurialism”; primary and secondary schools sell advertising space in their classrooms to pay for extracurricular activities; churches develop “branding” strategies; in their leisure time, people read books on how to be “highly effective.” The irony is that people are increasingly looking to the market to solve the very crises that the market is creating. When pressed for explanations, public figures frequently represent social inequality as a fact of life, or they blame the victims. After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, conservative pundits such as Glenn Beck and Charles Murray suggested that the loss of life was due to the irresponsibility of the mostly black underclass. Their commentary studiously avoided discussion of the scarce transportation options available to victims, just as it deflected attention away from years of public underfunding for levee repair. Reflecting on public opinion polls about the hurricane, political scientist Michael C. Dawson contends that “whites viewing the aftermath to Katrina see a relatively uncomplicated landscape dominated by inept government and blacks behaving badly. . . . Blacks viewing the

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aftermath to Katrina, much like the 1968 Kerner Committee Report, see two countries, black and white, separate and unequal.”35 A similar pattern emerged after the collapse of the real estate market in 2008. Many commentators on television and in print suggested that irresponsible borrowing by minority homeowners was to blame for the bursting of the housing bubble. These assessments were built on bad data. They conveniently ignored the enormous wealth these loans had produced for upper-income whites, and they turned a blind eye to the fact that housing represented for minorities one of the few sources of college and retirement funds in a period of declining wages. Like other texts of the Chicano movement, the “Plan of Delano” looks not to the market for solutions, but to direct action. It describes in detail the crimes committed against farmworkers, including “starvation wages” and “forced migration.” It places blame at the feet of “the rancher” who has “abandoned [the farmworker] to his own fate— without representation, without power.” The manifesto then seeks remedy, not through managerial reform, but through nonviolent confrontation: Our revolution will not be armed, but we want the existing social order to dissolve; we want a new social order. We are poor, we are humble, and our only choice is to strike in those ranches where we are not treated with the respect we deserve as working men [sic], where our rights as free and sovereign men are not recognized. . . . We shall overcome!36 People sometimes dismiss the utopianism of the 1960s as naïveté. By the time Luis Valdez wrote the “Plan of Delano” in 1966, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and other UFW leaders had been organizing California’s Central Valley for more than three years. The futureoriented promise of “a new social order” was already visible among farmworkers who—many for the first time in their lives—recognized their personal and collective dignity. This recognition was a victory in its own right, because a first aim of the exploiter is to convince the exploited that they deserve no better. The original “Plan of Delano” was typewritten, mimeographed, and disseminated informally, but in the fall of 1966 it was published in book form alongside the realist images of photographer George Ballis. Its powerful defense of labor rights in an outsourcing economy makes ¡Basta! La historia de nuestra lucha/Enough! The Tale of Our Struggle as relevant today as it was when it was first published. However, the lessons

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of this important cultural text are hard to access because the Chicano movement occupies an indistinct place in U.S. history. Most people have a working knowledge of the political dynamics that shaped the mostly white counterculture of the 1960s, even if this knowledge is sometimes overlaid by caricatured images of long hair, acid, and free love. The African American civil rights movement is also widely known, though it, too, is sometimes rendered one-dimensionally in mass media. The enslavement and segregation of black people has played a foundational role in American society and government since the earliest days of British colonialism. The success that African American activists and their allies had in attacking this foundation made postwar civil rights activism one of the most consequential and most admired chapters in American history. Mexican Americans participated in the struggle for black civil rights. Elizabeth Martínez, for example, registered voters in Mississippi during the 1964 Freedom Summer project, and she later served as New York coordinator of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).37 Black activism and Chicano/a activism together formed part of a postwar democratic insurgency, but the Chicano movement is rarely remembered as such in popular history. The curricula of primary and secondary schools in the United States bear this out. A generation ago, social studies textbooks ignored the Chicano movement altogether. Contemporary textbooks are more inclusive and more sophisticated in their analysis. Paul Boyer and Sterling Stuckey’s high-school volume American Nation provides the best available treatment. In addition to giving background on U.S.–Latin American relations and on histories of discrimination against Latinos/as, the textbook gives a six-page overview of the movement, including impressive multimedia resources, an explanation of the word “Chicano” and of Aztlán, and an overview of regional differences. Gary Nash’s American Odyssey is also noteworthy. Not only does the book discuss the UFW, it also discusses feminist initiatives within the movement, the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the Zoot Suit Riots, and debates in the 1990s about affirmative action and redistricting. The attention that these textbooks pay to the Chicano movement and to the larger multicultural history of the United States is a testament to the success of antiracist activism during the past several decades. However, many volumes still provide insufficient commentary on the full scope of postwar civil rights activism. Under the heading “Other Groups Seek Rights,” Joyce Appleby’s American Journey includes only a few short paragraphs on the farmworker movement, never mentioning the words “Chicano”

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or “Chicana,” and never making connections with other progressive social movements.38 The American historical imagination needs a fuller narrative of how progressive Chicano/a activism shaped and was shaped by the 1960s, just as it needs a more grounded sense of how this activism relates to contemporary political struggles. Art can be a useful tool for developing this richer historical imagination. The “Plan of Delano,” for example, owes both its populist content and its exhortatory form to previous manifestos from north and south of the U.S.-Mexico border: the 1915 “Plan de San Diego,” which called for persons of “the Latin, the Negro, or the Japanese race” to take up arms and reclaim territory ceded by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; Emiliano Zapata’s 1911 “Plan de Ayala,” which decried corruption in the Mexican Revolution and demanded the nationalization of wealth; and the 1821 “Plan de Iguala,” which formalized Mexican independence from Spain. Stylistically and thematically, the “Plan of Delano” belongs to this long tradition of radicalism in the Americas. It also belongs to the canon of manifestos that emerged from the social movements of the 1960s, including the Port Huron Statement, the Redstockings Manifesto, the Black Panthers’ “Ten Point Program,” and the Yippie Manifesto. Like the Delano document, these varied texts used unqualified declaratives and a strict analytical structure to challenge the artifice of postwar consensus, and to grab audience attention at a time of increasing media-made distraction. The formal parallels between them offer a window on the Chicano movement’s complex embeddedness both in 1960s politics in the United States, and in transnational left cultures, particularly in Latin America. Music provides another cultural avenue for understanding the points of contact between the Chicano movement and the broader social and political currents of the postwar era. It was rhythm and blues that provided the sound track to the Chicano movement. Mexican Americans listened to other genres, including jazz, rock, mariachi, boleros, and corridos, but they were especially drawn to the black sounds of doo-wop and R&B. In Los Angeles, this affection started early. During the 1950s, while white youth were listening mainly to pop vocalists such as Patti Page, or to Elvis Presley and other early rock-and-rollers, Chicanos/ as were listening to Little Richard, Johnny Otis, Richard Berry, Big Jay McNeely, and Fats Domino.39 The appeal of this music stemmed both from the physical proximity of African Americans and Mexican Americans to each other in the barrios and ghettos of southern California, and from the desire for cultural distance from the white mainstream.

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Adults weren’t always happy about the popularity of black music among Chicano/a youth. Some parents forbade their children from purchasing offensive records, and city elites tried to steer Mexican American adolescents away from rhythm and blues by sponsoring classical music programs at the Hollywood Bowl.40 These efforts rarely succeeded, though. Young people continued buying 45s at East L.A.’s Record Rack, dancing at the El Monte Legion Stadium or the Hollywood Palladium, and listening to disc jockey Huggy Boy’s R&B and rock-and-roll program on radio station KRKD.41 The 1964 Beatles “invasion” inspired garage bands across East Los Angeles and helped popularize groups such as the Ambertones, the Romancers, Cannibal and the Headhunters, Thee Midniters, the Sisters (an all-woman band), and the Rhythm Playboys.42 A few of these bands garnered modest national and even international attention, but most remained popular only among Los Angeles audiences. Still, they created a distinctive style, one that gave sonic expression to the political energies of the moment. The Romancers’ “My Heart Cries” was a 1963 cover of an R&B duet by Etta James and Harvey Fuqua. The band’s crooning ballad, which is praised by David Reyes and Tom Waldman as “one of the better-kept secrets of Chicano rock ’n’ roll,” keeps the languor of the original, but it adds the harmonic line and crisp instrumental notes of mariachi.43 Lead singer Max Uballez said the cover was inspired by the Mexican song “La noche y tú,” which he sometimes heard played in Los Angeles.44 The top-forty hit “Land of 1000 Dances” (1965) by Cannibal and the Headhunters was a cover of a song first recorded by New Orleans musician Chris Kenner in 1962. Producers of the East L.A. band brought fans into the studio to reproduce the feeling of a barrio concert. Unable to remember the lyrics during rehearsal, lead vocalist Frankie Garcia improvised a “na na na na” intro. His mistake turned into one of the most famous hooks in American pop music, especially after it was covered by R&B singer Wilson Pickett in 1966. “My Heart Cries” and “Land of 1000 Dances” are just two examples of an extended musical dialogue between African Americans and Chicanos/as after World War II. This artistic dialogue has a political resonance. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin note in their classic Detroit: I Do Mind Dying that Motown channeled the labor unrest surrounding the urban rebellion of 1967 and the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.45 The Mexican American musical style that emerged in the 1960s was a powerful cross-pollination. It joined Mexican Americans to black labor struggles in Detroit and elsewhere, in much the same way

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as the “pachucos” and “pachucas” of 1930s- and 1940s-era jazz subculture. It made connections with a mostly white counterculture that also expressed its alienation through music. And it gave voice to the transnational dimensions of progressive Chicano/a politics. Listening carefully to the music of the Chicano movement can help broaden public understanding of the links between the various social movements of the 1960s at a time when this broadening is badly needed. Traditional historical narratives draw neat boundaries around the diverse social movements of the postwar era, treating their origins, participants, and goals as distinct from each other. There were indeed differences and tensions between, for example, black nationalism and the Chicano movement. These realities must be dealt with honestly, but they should not be allowed to obscure the ideological, institutional, and personal connections between and among the various progressive struggles that lent shape and significance to the 1960s. Neither should these differences and tensions be allowed to detract from the simple but profound truth that the left movements of the period bettered and continue to better the world we live in. This transformation is not always easy to perceive, since the 1960s are stereotyped and sentimentalized in U.S. popular and political culture. Todd Gitlin argues that with the passage of time “’the Sixties’ receded into haze and myth: lingering images of nobility and violence, occasional news clips of Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy, Beatles and Bob Dylan retrospectives, the jumble of images this culture shares instead of a sense of continuous, lived history.”46 His commentary points to what may be art’s greatest usefulness for thinking about the 1960s in general, and the Chicano movement in particular. The arts are capable of taking what has become old or clichéd and recasting it. This capacity—often realized in Chicano/a art and literature—can help to undo 1960s sentimentality and to replace it with the deeper “sense of continuous, lived history” for which Gitlin rightly calls.

Rethinking 1960s Sentimentality The 1960s occupy a particularly prominent place in U.S. political history. The “baby boomers” were coming of age during the decade. Theirs was a generational cohort of unequaled size, before or since. America’s domestic economy was expanding at an unprecedented rate. Disposable income levels were high. Film, radio, and television—still relatively new communication technologies—saturated everyday life, consolidating the

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power of the culture industry, and transforming everything from childhood play to presidential elections. The governing coalition between southern Democrats and northern Republicans that had been produced by the Great Depression and by World War II was coming apart, largely because of widespread opposition among whites to civil rights for African Americans. Meanwhile, the U.S. presence in Vietnam was escalating from a low-profile military action to a full-scale war. By the end of the decade, the lies used to justify the conflict were wearing thin, and public support was collapsing. Partisan debate about the decade and its legacies has produced a peculiar kind of sentimentality around the 1960s. As historian Bernard von Bothmer argues, liberals and conservatives tell competing stories about what happened in this era. The liberal narrative emphasizes “the positive associations of the ‘good sixties,’” meaning the Kennedy years between 1960 and 1963.47 For liberals, Kennedy’s “thousand days” in office represented an opportunity at last to realize the promise of American freedom.48 The conservative narrative emphasizes “the bad sixties,” which stretch from the beginning of Johnson’s Great Society program in 1964, to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. For conservatives, these years marked the beginning of American decline, a period of “urban riots, antiwar protests, difficulties in fighting the Vietnam War, increased incivility, crime, drug abuse, and social arrest.”49 The competing liberal and conservative narratives create two very different affects toward the 1960s. Conservatives are fueled by anger at what they see as the enormously destructive influence the decade had on U.S. society. This anger began structuring contemporary conservatism early on. According to von Bothmer, “Reagan invented ‘the sixties’ during the 1960s and was against ‘the sixties’ even before the decade ended.”50 It gives the former governor of California too much credit to say he invented the idea, but von Bothmer is right in saying that Reagan consolidated Republican opposition. During the past three decades, the conservative movement has used a version of the 1960s to stir voter anger and to erode some of the political victories won by progressives. During the 1970s and 1980s, opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment blocked ratification by representing its supporters as man-hating radicals determined to destroy the family. Never one to go for subtlety, the influential archconservative Phyllis Schlafly wrote: “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as a basic unit of society. . . . Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the ‘slavery’ of marriage. They are promoting Federal ‘day-care centers’

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for babies instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.”51 Schlafly’s use of the charged expression “free sex” was a clever manipulation of powerful cultural stereotypes of the 1960s as a time of reckless hedonism. In 1993, Myron Magnet argued in The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass that the “cultural revolution” of the liberal elites (or “Haves”) has “weakened families and communities” through its me-first attitude and trained the poor (or “Have-Nots”) to blame the system for their plight, rather than work their way out of poverty.52 Though the book is premised on a patronizing attitude toward African Americans and a naïve image of the United States before the 1960s, it has been influential. President George W. Bush—who said The Dream and the Nightmare was second only to the Bible in its influence on his thinking—used Magnet’s commentary as his ideological justification for cuts to already underfunded federal antipoverty programs. When Bush was elected in 2000, domestic discretionary spending, which includes education, welfare, and housing, comprised 18.4 percent of the budget, compared to 21.7 percent for defense. By the time he left office in 2008, discretionary spending had been reduced to 14.7 percent, while military spending had increased to 29.2 percent.53 These cuts were fueled by conservative anger about the perceived excess of liberal “taxand-spend” policies. The Chicano movement has been a target in this conservative attack on the 1960s. In 1991, Republican activist Linda Chavez claimed that leaders of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) and other movement organizations had “enhanced their own power” by “demanding entitlements based on ethnicity and disadvantaged status.”54 Chavez argued that these “entitlements” such as affirmative action undermine the assimilation pattern that allowed Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants to enter the American middle class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A career opponent of the labor movement, she ignored the post–World War II economic restructuring that gutted trade unions, the historic engine of class mobility for white ethnics. In 2002, Chavez escalated her attack on the Chicano movement with the publication of the provocatively titled An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal, or, How I Became the Most Hated Hispanic in America. Like David Horowitz, Peter Collier, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and a number of other prominent conservatives, Chavez positioned herself rhetorically as a 1960s liberal who had seen the light. The evidence sugggests she was never a liberal to begin with, though.55 She voted for

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Democrats in 1972 and 1976, supported feminist “equal pay for equal work” policies, and hung around the fringes of the African American and the Chicano civil rights movements. Throughout her life she has benefitted directly from liberal policies, including the affirmative action programs she spent her career undermining. However, she admits that in 1980, the year she first voted Republican, she was “on most issues . . . still the Catholic schoolgirl, respectful of authority, more comfortable with a fixed moral code, and with a reverence for tradition and decorum.”56 Chicano/a activists were also respectful of authority, morality, and tradition, so long as they were used as tools of justice rather than as weapons of inequality. But Chavez dismisses her progressive contemporaries as “cronies” and “professional ethnic[s].”57 Her anger at the Chicano movement paints with a broad and slanderous brush what was a coalition of diverse people working toward sometimes very different goals, and often with very different means. Conservatives like Chavez are not the only ones whose sentiment toward the 1960s inflects their political thinking. Liberals and leftists have cultivated their own powerful forms of affect about the period. For many of them, the 1960s are enveloped in regret over the direction that history took, and in sadness over all the dreams that weren’t realized. Tom Hayden says of himself and his peers: “We ourselves became infected with many of the diseases of the society we wished to erase. Thinking we could build a new world, we self-destructed in a decade. . . . That burden of self-imposed failures weighs heavily.”58 The narrative that structures this mournful sentiment sees the election of John F. Kennedy as a symbol of the optimism that began the decade, an optimism that is said to have faded after Kennedy’s assassination and after the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Tom Brokaw’s recent retrospective of the decade gives an example: It was November 22, 1963, and it was, in effect, the beginning of what we now call the Sixties. Kennedy’s death was stunning not just because he was president. He was such a young president, and his election just three years before had kindled the dreams and aspirations of the young generation he embodied and inspired. His death seemed to rob us of all that was youthful and elegant, cool and smart, hopeful and idealistic. Who now would stir our generation by suggesting we “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country?”59 The narrative Brokaw tells has considerable irony. It was Kennedy who in 1961 committed American troops to the mission of propping up the

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corrupt administration of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dihn Diem.60 Kennedy’s record on civil rights was mixed, and his anti-Keynesian approach to ending the recession of the early 1960s involved a regressive tax cut and tepid public spending. As historian William O’Neill put it, “President Kennedy’s politics were hardly less conventional, and not much more liberal, than Nixon’s.”61 If not for the persistent mythology of an enchanted Camelot, public perception of Kennedy and of his policies would likely be less fervid. Progressive sentiment about the 1960s would certainly be less tragic in its tone. Anger among conservatives about the social movements of the 1960s has dominated the political culture of the last forty years. It won seven presidential elections since 1968, pulled the federal judiciary to the right, and hardened the partisan divide in Congress. However, the more liberal sentiment of sadness has dominated popular culture. Even before President Kennedy’s death, Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” captured what seemed to many a generational mood. The song, which was written by Pete Seeger and covered by the trio on their 1962 debut album, conveyed an ethereal sadness through its plaintive harmonies and its Whitmanesque refrain. Popular songs from later in the decade echoed this melancholy, among them Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963), Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” (1967), and the Rolling Stones’s “Ruby Tuesday” (1967). The sorrowful notes that structure these melodies gave a framework for later visual interpretations of the 1960s, including television shows such as The Wonder Years (1988–93), and such films as The Big Chill (1983) and Forrest Gump (1994). Most workers in the culture industry have liberal political views. This is one reason why popular media persistently grieves the 1960s. A second and larger reason is institutional: the 1960s marked the first time a generational cohort came of age in a truly mass media environment.62 If successful, a TV show, album, or film could define a cultural moment. Now that cable television, satellite radio, and the Internet have divided audiences into niche markets, elite producers no longer enjoy the reach they once did. The culture industry is only beginning to adjust to this shift. Like the decade it is most closely associated with, the Chicano movement is often narrated using what Max Cavitch (in a different context) calls an “elegiac temper” that mourns the premature death of the struggle.63 As with the 1960s in general, this temperament is legible in several memoirs, histories, and documentaries.64 Mario Barrera’s and Marilyn Mulford’s film Chicano Park (1988) tells the story of an early1970s effort in San Diego’s Barrio Logan to block a proposed highway

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patrol headquarters and to build instead a recreation area with green space, murals, and performance venues. Chicano Park is thriving well into the twenty-first century, and many of the activists and artists who were involved then are still active in community service. However, the narrator of the film laments that by the mid-1970s, “the politics of the Chicano Movement had changed. Less confrontation. More meetings, meetings, and more meetings.”65 Carlos Muñoz Jr.—one of the “East Los Angeles 13” arrested on conspiracy charges after the school walkouts of 1968—writes in his authoritative history that “the Chicano student movement and the larger Chicano Movement of which it was a major part exemplified the politics of a decade unique in the history of the United States. . . . But times changed. The movements of the sixties that had been sources of inspiration for Mexican American youth disappeared into the pages of history by the mid-1970s.” José Angel Gutiérrez, a founder of the Chicano/a third-party La Raza Unida and among the visible leaders of the Chicano movement, says in his autobiography: “My generation of Chicano activists made events happen. We were determined, motivated, political actors in the Chicano movement. As proud militants and ready activists, we had resolve.”66 After an activist reunion in 1988, Gutiérrez noted that his peers had become “middle-aged” and “middle-class,” with “wrinkles and gray hair.” “Clearly,” Gutiérrez says, “we were the past generation.”67 Even those who felt alienated from the Chicano movement or who were born after it sometimes mourn its supposed passing. As a lightskinned Chicana and a closeted lesbian, Cherríe Moraga felt alienated during the 1970s by dominant Chicano nationalism’s valuation of brown skin as a metaphor of authenticity, and also by its idealization of heterosexual families as the symbol of cultural purity. Grassroots activism and scholarship by Gloria Anzaldúa, Richard T. Rodríguez, Norma Alarcón, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Anna NietoGomez, Alma Lopez, Maylei Blackwell, and Moraga herself has made progressive Chicano/a politics more inclusive of gays and lesbians, and also more nuanced in its handling of racial difference within Chicano/a communities. Yet even with these advances, Moraga still eulogizes the past. She writes: “I mourn the dissolution of an active Chicano Movement possibly more strongly than my generational counterparts because during its ‘classic period,’ I was unable to act publicly.”68 Her poignant commentary shows the diverse sources from which mourning for the movement springs. These elegies for the social movements and cultural developments of the 1960s could be dismissed as harmless nostalgia for youth, or as

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historical poetry, were it not for their considerable impact on contemporary U.S. politics. They do a service to progressive politics in that they preserve a memory of the past in a culture often obsessed with the present and the future. Ironically, though, these eulogies preserve the past ahistorically. They homogenize an entire generational cohort, giving the wrong impression that all young people in the 1960s were entirely consumed with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Many youth sat on the sidelines, either indifferent to, or unsure of, the social, cultural, and political changes happening around them. Others were involved in activism, but as Republicans. The popular perception of the 1960s suggests that young people identified as liberals or even as radicals, while their “Greatest Generation” parents clung to the traditional institutions of patriotism, religion, and the family. In fact, even among teenagers and twenty-somethings, conservatism and liberalism warred with each other. The 1960s witnessed the formation of the Students for a Democratic Society, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), and SNCC, but it also gave rise to the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative organization that helped launch the resentment-fueled careers of pundit Pat Buchanan and direct-mail operative Richard Viguerie.69 Elegies for the 1960s obscure this battle, and in doing so give cover to Republican framing of the decade as a period of reckless liberalism. Conservatism wreaked far more havoc in the United States and around the globe than did any flower child, New Leftist, or cultural nationalist. As proof, one need look no farther than the paranoid anticommunism that stalled civil rights at home, destabilized democratically elected governments in Latin America and Africa, and perpetuated the war in Vietnam. Elegies for the 1960s create a troublesome exceptionalism that sequesters the period from the political currents that came before and after. The counterculture, for example, is represented in cultural texts ranging from The Graduate (1967) to Mad Men (2007–present) and from Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966) to Vineland (1990) as a quasi-Oedipal struggle within the white middle class between stern parents and their rebellious children. This narrative of generational rebellion colors our thinking about the postwar moment, propping up the idea that the 1960s was a singularly turbulent, transformative decade. The idea is more romance than reality, though. Ideologically, the pushand-pull during the 1960s between deep faith in the American dream and anxiety about its demise has a long history in the United States. As Sacvan Bercovitch argues, seventeenth-century Puritanism established a rhetorical pattern in which present failings were transformed through

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condemnation into reminders of the nation’s providential mission.70 This “American jeremiad” (as Bercovitch famously calls it) was a staple of 1960s political discourse. Even the experimentation that defines the decade in popular imagination—the quest for “higher consciousness,” the sexual libertinism and group living, and the search for alternative economies—had precedent in the socialist communes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, among them the Oneida Community (1848–1881) in New York or the Spirit Fruit Society (1914–1939) in Ohio.71 The relationship between and among different age cohorts during the 1960s was also more complex than 1960s exceptionalism allows. More than a few activists were “red-diaper babies” whose left-leaning parents not only approved of their children’s political involvement, but also nurtured it. Those young people who didn’t have progressive parents may have been rebelling, but their rebellion was more complex than the popular caricature admits. Dominick Cavallo argues that white youth in both the counterculture and in the New Left had internalized the “autonomy and intellectual independence” their middle-class, mostly professional parents had taught them.72 They used this training to criticize the world handed to them by the previous generation, but their critique was not as clear a departure as they sometimes imagined. The situation was different for working-class kids, and especially for minorities. Their parents sometimes disapproved of their activism. Delia Alvarez became involved in Chicano/a antiwar activism after her brother Everett’s plane was shot down over Vietnam in 1964. Her public protests angered her father, but she viewed them as the only way to get her brother home and to prevent other parents from suffering the way hers did.73 Regardless of their family’s opinion of the Chicano movement, Chicano/a activists usually saw themselves as fighting not against their parents, but rather for their parents. Most Chicano/a baby boomers were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and so their activism was often fueled by anger at the discrimination their parents endured. This sociological difference reflected the contradictory relationship Mexican Americans had with the wider Left of the 1960s, and especially with the counterculture. Raised in devout Catholic homes by workingclass parents, many Chicanos/as were suspicious of what they saw as the moral libertinism and the class decadence of white hippies. Yet these same individuals often shared the counterculture’s desire for a utopian alternative to the status quo. They had even more reason to feel alienated from what C. Wright Mills called “the power elite” and its values than their white peers.74 This ambivalence led many young Chicanos/

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as to identify with the counterculture, but to remain on its periphery. Many smoked pot or used psychedelic drugs; some men grew their hair out, and some women went unshaven; activists often wore secondhand clothing from army/navy surplus stores to show sympathy for soldiers and to challenge American consumerism’s fetishizing of the new; and most loved the music of the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. Always, though, they sought to create their own spaces of community and culture. Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) thematizes this dynamic. Buffalo, the largerthan-life protagonist of Acosta’s fictionalized autobiography, is drawn to hippie attitudes about sex, work, and spirituality. His sister Teresa has married a white Marine and moved to a San Fernando suburb, but Buffalo is a man “running around the world, talking of writing and revolution and women and death.”75 The considerable emotional drama of the novel comes from the first-person narrator’s attempts at reconciling his private desires with his public commitments. He wants to “turn on, tune in, and drop out”—to use Timothy Leary’s famous line—but he feels a sense of responsibility to his family and to his community. In this respect he resembles the author Oscar Zeta Acosta, a tragic figure who disappeared in Mexico in 1974. The fictional Buffalo—like Acosta himself—never managed to reconcile the tension between the individual and the collective. Most movement activists, though, found a way to channel their rebellious energy into social change. Revolt of the Cockroach People illustrates how and why the generational thinking traditionally applied to the 1960s fails to fully explain Mexican American politics. Yet a version of 1960s exceptionalism does make its way into the pages of Chicano/a history. Activists of that era often represented the Chicano movement as an awakening, a moment when Mexican Americans at last decided they had had enough abuse. The influential “El plan espiritual de Aztlán” gives an example of this framework. Written by the poet Alurista and first delivered at the seminal Chicano Youth Liberation conference of 1969, the manifesto’s preamble augured a revolution: “In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage, but also of the brutal ‘Gringo’ invasion of our territories: We, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán . . . declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.”76 José Angel Gutiérrez echoed this sentiment in comments he made to NBC News on September 4, 1972, at the La Raza Unida convention: “These are Chicano people here. You’ve never met us. We’re not in the dictionary. It’s a

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brand-new ball game. You’re going to have to relearn all your stereotypes and all your myths because we’re about to begin creating new ones.”77A popular sign at movement rallies used the Latin American anticolonial expression “¡Ya Basta!” (Enough Already!) to suggest a rupture with the past, and one of the movement’s vanguard feminist publications was titled Regeneración (Regeneration). Metaphors of rebirth and renewal were in fact pervasive in the rhetoric of the Chicano movement, as in other movements of the 1960s. The language of innovation often formed part of a contrast between the activism of the Chicano/a generation and the quiescence of previous generations. The contrast is misleading, as Mexicans in America have a long history of political involvement. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo extended specific legal protections to persons who chose to remain in the conquered territories, among them “the free enjoyment of their liberty and property.” The protections were honored more in the breach than in the observance, and so these new Mexican Americans were compelled to organize and fight on their own behalf during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Sometimes the struggle was violent and uncoordinated, as in the case of the mythologized “bandits” Tiburcio Vásquez and Joaquín Murrieta. More often the fight was peaceful and coordinated, as with the many mutual-aid societies that sprung up across the Southwest and Midwest. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885)—the first novels published in English by a Latina—used the conventions of sentimental fiction to protest the American government’s trampling of the cultural and legal rights of Mexicans in the United States. The outrage she captures on the page in her complex and sometimes contradictory novels grounded political mobilizing well into the twentieth century, including collective action against the “repatriation” campaigns of the 1930s. After the October 1929 stock market crash triggered a new wave of race resentment among whites, several states and the federal government raided Chicano/a communities and deported without due process almost 1 million Mexicans, some of them U.S. citizens. Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans responded to this injustice by forming relief groups such as La Cruz Azul Mexicana (the Mexican Blue Cross), lobbying the Mexican government for resettlement aid, and organizing protests in Los Angeles, Detroit, San Antonio, and elsewhere.78 The anticommunist paranoia that engulfed American society after World War II eroded the institutions and the memory of the Chicano/a

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Left, just as it undermined the labor movement and the Left more broadly. Movement activists sometimes knew the general outlines of Mexican American history, but they often didn’t have a sense of how this history impacted their lives, or what they might learn from it. At a time of historical amnesia and widespread political intimidation, the 1960s rhetoric of rebirth and renewal gave activists the courage they needed to confront postwar America’s militarism and entrenched inequality. This development came at a cost, though. Movement exceptionalism tended to magnify the effects of the presentism that Mexican Americans (like their peers) were exposed to via mass media and dominant society. It deepened their isolation from a rich tradition of cultural and political activism, leaving them more vulnerable to infighting and to sabotage. The September 1972 convention of La Raza Unida in El Paso, Texas, began with tremendous excitement as participants pursued a national platform for progressive Chicano/a politics. However, things soon devolved into bickering over leadership and parliamentary procedure. What many attendees interpreted as an unprecedented personality dispute over which man—Reies López Tijerina, Corky Gonzales, or José Angel Gútierrez—should represent the Chicano “nation” was in fact a new wrinkle in an old debate over the prospects for change within the system. A deeper sense of historical perspective would have helped activists to recognize the controversy for what it was, and to navigate it more cautiously.79 In an ironic turn, exceptionalist rhetoric also alienated the movement activism of the 1960s from the events that came after. Documents such as “El plan espiritual de Aztlán” invoked a new political order advancing toward the future. Chronologically, the present moment belongs to that future, but many commentators speak of a rupture that happened along the way. The dates of this rupture vary. Some say the movement began to unravel in August 1970, after police provocation at the antiwar “Chicano Moratorium” led to three deaths and extensive property damage in East Los Angeles. Others say the beginning of the end was the embattled La Raza Unida convention in 1972. Armando Navarro claims that the movement ended in 1974 in the midst of “a sectarian ideological war.” Still others say it concluded with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.80 The fact that different dates are used for the chronology of the Chicano movement shows just how difficult it can be to narrate the history of social movements. More significant, though, is the sense of decline attached to this chronology, a feeling not just that the Chicano movement died, but that in its place came something foreign and contemptible.

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This sentiment represents the ugly side of the 1960s elegy. Many of the same people who have eulogized the Chicano movement in print or on film have also publicly condemned the cohort that succeeded the “Chicano generation.” José Angel Gutiérrez says that “those of us from the Chicano generation were intent on bringing about an entire package of change for all.” He fears, though, that “the subsequent generation, our children, the Hispanic Generation, are not activists and doers. They do work for change for themselves. They seldom work for change for others. . . . They have paid no price for their benefits; hence, they don’t know why they should struggle and fight.”81 Respected activist and scholar Armando Navarro is just as harsh. He says of the “Viva Yo Hispanic Generation” (Long Live Myself) generation that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s: From a political cultural perspective, its “ethos” embraced the ideological beliefs, values, and symbols of liberal capitalism. The emphasis was on the “I” rather than the “we,” and it embraced the Horatio Alger “bootstrap” argument that anyone can make it or be successful providing they are competitive, hardworking, and willing to sacrifice. Moreover, it adhered to a rather middle-class to higher-class bias toward free enterprise, consumerism, materialism, individualism, and pursuit of unbridled wealth. “What’s in it for me” was a pervasive attitude.82 Navarro gives little evidence to support these generalizations, apart from a handful of trifling statistics and anecdotes about the use of the label “Hispanic” versus “Mexicano” or “Chicano.” It’s a disappointing passage in an otherwise illuminating book. The “declension narrative” told by Gutiérrez, Garcia, and Navarro finds frequent echo in commentary on other social movements of the 1960s.83 One story suggests that as the idealistic 1960s turned into the cynical 1970s, members of the largely white counterculture came back into the fold of dominant society. By the 1980s, their principled protests against government wrongdoing had purportedly turned into greedy antitax initiatives, their pursuit of the good life into a hedonistic obsession with material things. The decision of “Yippie” leader Jerry Rubin to work in Wall Street has been held up as an example of this decline, though as Todd Gitlin suggests, for every one Rubin, there were many more New Left “graduates” who continued to work away from the media glare as union leaders and disarmament activists.84 A second version of the 1960s declension narrative suggests that the 1960s marked a

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disastrous pivot from the unified class politics of the 1930s to the divisive “identity politics” of the post-1960s era. Walter Benn Michaels tells a version of this story, though with little genuine understanding of the multicultural Left and its sophisticated understanding of how class divisions operate through race in a postindustrial economy.85 A third version says the hard-won victories of the 1950s and 1960s were squandered by the ungratefulness of the generation that came after. Sara Evans documents this narrative among feminists, but it is especially potent in the world of black politics, where commentators such as Bill Cosby complain that the “hip-hop” generation has wasted the opportunities given it by the civil rights generation. Declension narratives may be appealing as nostalgia, but they are flawed in that they offer shallow generalizations about morality, when what is needed is critical thinking about historical change. The post1960s decades have undoubtedly seen their share of apathy and greed among all segments of society. Those same things could be found in the 1960s, though. The real difference between the 1960s and what came after lies not in the level of individual commitment to political goals, or in generational traits. It lies instead in the social and political climate in which progressive politics takes place. The liberal-Left coalition forged out of the financial crisis of the 1930s had produced by the 1960s a broad commitment to the collective good. This commitment led in turn to a relatively prosperous economy and to “rising expectations” for marginalized populations that were previously seen only as disposable labor pools. Mobilizing among workers and the democratizing pressures of Cold War foreign policy prompted wage increases and civil rights reforms. A reorganized GOP and their corporate backers responded to the progressive victories of the mid-twentieth century by pouring unprecedented levels of money into the political process and by creating a right-wing propaganda machine that included the National Review, the Heritage Institute, and eventually Fox News. Their first success was the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, but their most important victory was the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan tore apart the fragile social-safety net that had been formed out of the New Deal, redistributed wealth from the bottom to the top, and gutted the federal government’s civil rights protections. Chicano/a and Latino/a activist networks were put on the defensive by the conservative countermovement, but they were not destroyed. Dramatic changes in the media landscape have also impacted the Chicano movement. The 1960s represent the apex of a truly mass media: growing rates of disposable income fueled a Hollywood boom; radio was

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embedded in everyday life; and television was a household fixture. Public assembly at sites of symbolic national importance has been an essential “repertoire of protest” since the formation of the modern nation-state and the rise of the daily newspaper in the eighteenth century.86 Assemblies were especially effective in postwar politics, though, because the consolidation of the FM signal and a limited number of TV networks allowed maximum exposure. Progressive activists spent considerable time and energy pursuing airtime, and with mixed results. The 1963 March on Washington gave incontrovertible proof of the power of television as a political tool. However, the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention showed that the pursuit of media exposure could lead to physical repression and public backlash. Mexican Americans learned this lesson firsthand at the Chicano Moratorium on August 29, 1970. The media calculus changed in the later 1970s. The rapid expansion of cable television carved audiences up into narrow target demographics. This market segmentation—which intensified with the advent of satellite broadcasting and the Internet—made it harder for protesters to deliver their message to a broad public. Paradoxically, even as the television industry became consolidated within a relatively small number of global corporations, it became a more diffuse presence in everyday life, making audiences skeptical of televisual politics. This skepticism is good insofar as it reflects an awareness of how elites manipulate media for antidemocratic interests, as when George W. Bush’s campaign operatives staged mock protests during the 2000 Florida recount. It is destructive, though, in that it has generated widespread cynicism toward the public sphere as an arena of politics. This cynicism breeds apathy. The macrolevel changes in economy and media surrounding progressive politics are joined by changes that are specific to Chicano/a politics. Latino/a communities across the United States have become more diverse, and this demographic shift has shaped the nature of Chicano/a activism. During the 1950s and 1960s, Mexican Americans lived in largely homogeneous ethnic enclaves, most often in the barrios located in and around major cities of the Southwest. An ideology based on common socioeconomic realities and on a shared ethnic identification was useful under such conditions, and thus various forms of cultural nationalism became dominant. The demographics have shifted a great deal since the 1960s. Historically Mexican barrios have become home to mixed populations of Latinos/as from Central America and the Caribbean, or they have been gentrified by young professionals, most of them

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white. At the same time, a small but growing number of Latinos/as have moved to the suburbs, where they send their kids to integrated schools, participate in integrated civic and religious organizations, and work in integrated postindustrial jobs. Many of these Latino/a suburbanites are middle-class professionals, but not all of them are. Some are workingclass, first-generation immigrants from Latin America who pool their resources and craft their own version of the American dream.87 Cultural nationalism was a powerful organizing tool during the 1960s and 1970s. It helped build bridges across regions and across classes, and it emboldened activists through a narrative of collective triumph over oppressors. Demographic change and internal debate prompted an evolution, though. The prevailing emphasis on traditional gender roles was replaced by a more feminist- and queer-friendly politics. Mexican American communities were always diverse, but this diversity deepened in the last decades of the twentieth century. As it did, the ideology of chicanismo gave way to a pan-Latino/a politics, or latinidad. This latinidad has sometimes been used as a marketing gimmick and evacuated of political content. But it has also been at times a vital tool in progressive politics. The changes that have taken place within and around Chicano/a communities since the 1960s have undoubtedly brought obstacles to progressive organizing. For example, some 36 percent of native-born Latino/ as oppose giving amnesty to unauthorized immigrants; the evidence is inconclusive, but this number likely correlates to rising class status for a subset of the population. Also, the massive neoliberal realignment of the economy of the last forty years has left most Chicanos/as (and everyone else) working harder for the same or less compensation, which makes it more difficult for individuals and communities to find time and energy for activism. Contrary to what movement elegies suggest, people are neither more nor less virtuous today than they were in the 1960s; they are, however, more beleaguered. This is the bad news. But even amid skyrocketing income inequality and signs of collective alienation, the decades since the 1960s have also brought about meaningful opportunities and more than a handful of victories for progressives. The large-scale public rallies that dominate our collective memory of the 1960s have declined in number and effectiveness because of media segmentation and a heightened cynicism— much of it justified—toward staged political events, but in their place has emerged a stronger emphasis on the local. As I detail in the chapters that follow, progressive Chicano/a activists have gained ground since the 1970s on a number of pivotal issues by focusing their attention on the

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grassroots, and often by working within institutions. Greater contact between Mexican Americans and Latinos/as from other Latin American and Caribbean backgrounds has blunted the rhetorical force of cultural nationalism, but it has also created effective political alliances on human rights and other issues, and it has made multilingualism a more central concern in Chicano/a politics. (Few problems are more urgent, yet more neglected, than the need for more and better language learning in the United States, including among Mexican Americans.) Even the slowly expanding Chicano/a middle class, attacked by hard-liners as a flock of vendidos (sell-outs), represents a tangible victory and a powerful political force. There are advantaged Latinos/as who try to strengthen their position as cultural citizens of the United States by differentiating themselves from the poor and brown “masses” so vilified in contemporary America.88 But there are others who ally themselves with the more vulnerable segments of the Latino/a population, both on principle and because of meaningful cultural bonds. My aim in highlighting some of these post-1960s political developments is not to produce a triumphalist counternarrative to the movement elegy in which we are marching ever onward to glory. As historian Van Gosse rightly argues, this kind of naïve “neo-Whig history” has its own pitfalls.89 What I am trying to do is shake up our perception of the Chicano movement and emphasize its contemporary significance by telling a different story about history. We often imagine ourselves in a linear relationship to the past, always receding from or advancing toward a moment of perfection. In a world as complex and sadly unjust as the one we live in, the appeal of this narrative arc is considerable. But whatever its virtues, the dominant model of history as a straight line does not fully represent its back and forth, its unpredictability, and its many returns. Nor does this model capture well the irregular but definitive impact of social movements, which are, when it is all said and done, the engine of political change.

A Sense of the Past: Chicano Movement Art and Literature During the last decade, activists and scholars have been reexamining the social, cultural, and political significance of the 1960s.90 There are many reasons why: the need to record oral histories as members of the baby boomer generation age and pass away; a desire to see the 1960s with the new eyes that only the passage of time can provide; and, above all, the desire to push back against the conservative extremism of the Bush

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administration, an extremism driven to no small degree by a hatred of the progressive achievements of the 1960s. The result of this reexamination has been renewed attention to the period’s complexity, as well as a greater appreciation of the positive impact it had on the present. Young “third-wave” feminists are studying the 1960s and 1970s and collaborating with older leaders to protect reproductive rights and to extend educational and professional opportunities. Union leaders mindful of the damage that racism and infighting did to the labor movement during the postwar decades are organizing workers in the service sector and creating cross-ethnic and cross-industry coalitions. These activists often find inspiration for their efforts in the multiethnic civil rights movements of the 1960s. The Chicano movement has been part of this recent reappraisal. During the 1980s and 1990s, most commentary on the Chicano movement focused on the ways in which the leading Chicano nationalist doctrines of the 1960s and 1970s had marginalized women and compelled queers to remain in the closet. Norma Alarcón, Sandra Cisneros, Cherríe Moraga, Chela Sandoval, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Frederick Luis Aldama, Ana Castillo, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sonia Saldívar-Hull, among others, called for a progressive politics more fully committed to gender and sexual equality and more attuned to differences within Chicano/a communities. Their work challenged the chauvinist forms of machismo that circulated in some versions of Chicano nationalism, and in doing so allowed the Chicano movement to evolve and to confront the Reagan-era assault on women’s rights and on gay and lesbian freedom. In the twenty-first century, scholars and activists continue to build on this feminist-led initiative, even as they revisit the midtwentieth-century activism in search of lessons that might help confront a new wave of conservative attacks on civil rights and economic justice for all people. Recent commentary by scholars such as Jorge Mariscal, Richard T. Rodríguez, Dionne Espinoza, Ernesto Chávez, and Maylei Blackwell offers a complex and innovative view of the virtues and the flaws, the defeats, and the victories of Chicano/a activism during the 1960s and 1970s.91 The book you are reading is part of this effort to reconsider the nature and impact of the Chicano civil rights movement in the twenty-first century. Like the commentators named in the paragraph above, I aim to show how el movimiento Chicano continues to shape progressive politics long after its rumored demise in the 1970s. My particular focus, though, is on cultural politics, the arena of creative expression where personal

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and collective values get articulated, and where emotion and ideas come together. I contend that by looking carefully at the art that emerged from the movement, we can see that it didn’t die at all. Changes in technology, politics, economy, and demography forced the Chicano movement to evolve, but the spirit of progressive populism and cultural commitment that guided the activism during the 1960s and 1970s survives still. The most important manifestation of this spirit resides in the people whose lives were changed by the movement. Sometimes the impact is direct and dramatic, as in the lifelong union organizing of Eliseo Medina, in the ongoing intellectual work of the feminist group Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (Women Active in Letters and Social Change, or MALCS), and in the outreach efforts of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. More often the impact is indirect but no less real, as is the case with the innumerable students of all backgrounds who benefit from a richer and more accurate education in U.S. history and culture than their grandparents received, or with the undocumented migrants who find a broader base of support among native-born Latinos/as than before the Chicano movement. These changes are sometimes hard to perceive. Contemporary U.S. society is maddeningly presentist in its orientation. In order to meet quarterly earnings expectations, the corporate-driven economy of the nation uses advertising to stimulate consumer demand for goods and services. The effect is a permanent obsession with the new: new products, new experiences, new technologies, new markets, and new trends. Because wages have been stagnant in recent decades, workers must work longer hours to satisfy their current needs, let alone fulfill their future desires. In this economy of artificial scarcity, consideration of the past becomes a luxury that too few can afford, except as sentimental escape or as commercialized nostalgia. What is true of history is also true of art, which finds itself in a “best of times, worst of times” moment. Arguably, never before have humans been as immersed in forms of cultural production as they are now. Radio, television, film, the Internet, and magazine and book publishing are woven into the fabric of everyday life. Yet there are too few educational spaces, formal or informal, where people can learn how to think critically about the culture they consume, or how to produce and circulate their own content. Testing mandates have forced primary and secondary schools to focus on math and reading at the expense of media literacy, art, music, and social studies. The corporatizing of higher education has necessitated early specialization among undergraduates, which has fed

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a severe and growing divide between the humanities and social sciences on one side, and business, mathematics, engineering, and the physical sciences on the other. One of many consequences of this latter phenomenon is that too few humanists know how to program computer languages or interpret scientific data, and too few engineers and scientists have the historical and philosophical wherewithal to evaluate the social, political, and moral costs of the technologies they create. Cultural spaces such as museums, art galleries, libraries, and theaters are in a position to bridge this gap, but they face their own set of challenges. Cuts in government funding have forced these institutions either to scale back services or to rely on the private sector. This leaves the public—and especially the working-class public—increasingly alienated from the official avenues of culture-making. The 1960s and 1970s mark the period when social and economic realignment took hold, and movement activists were acutely aware of its significance. “Internal colonialism” was the Marxist phrase that many of them began to use to describe a political system that reinforced traditional military and police force with media innovations like television to reproduce European-style imperialism inside the borders of the United States. Following the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, they argued that cultural domination was being used as an alternative to direct violence. As an influential 1972 treatise phrased it, “dominant society has . . . waged a constant attack on Chicano values and other cultural traits through the schools, the media, and other institutions.”92 Activists were eager to reconnect with traditions and histories that had been denied them, and they were outraged at the culture industry’s refusal to recognize Mexican Americans as legitimate producers and consumers of art. When members of the avant-garde performance collective Asco approached the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1972 with an idea for an exhibit, the museum director dismissed them, saying that Chicanos/as made graffiti, not art. That night, Willie F. Herrón III, Gronk, and Harry Gamboa Jr. spray-painted their names on an exterior wall. The next morning, member Patssi Valdez completed the piece by posing for a furtive Gamboa photograph of what Chon Noriega describes as “the world’s largest work of Chicano art.”93 Since their art wasn’t welcome in the museum, Asco had decided to turn the entire museum into their art. The guerrilla ethos behind Spray Paint LACMA (also known humorously as Project Pie in De/Face) animated Chicano/a cultural production

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throughout the 1960s and 1970s and long after. Independent art institutions such as Self-Help Graphics in Los Angeles, the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, and the Mexican Fine Arts Museum (now the National Museum of Mexican Art) in Chicago began holding public workshops to give amateurs experience in silkscreen and other visual arts. Coffeehouses such as La Piranya in Los Angeles and cultural centers such as El Centro Chicano at the University of Southern California hosted poetry and fiction readings. At a time when elites in Los Angeles and New York were amassing unprecedented levels of control over mass media and popular culture, these venues provided opportunities for individuals of every background to experience the power and the pleasures of creative expression. They also helped cultivate new circuits of reception and influence. Chicano/a communities in the United States had fertile folk traditions that included altar making, décimas (a 10-line stanza poetry), local cuisine, carpa (tent) theater, and dance. But they had little access to education in the history and theory of art. In December 1969, Carmen Lomas Garza served as curator of an art exhibit at MAYO’s conference in Mission, Texas. While meetings took place upstairs, she stayed in the basement of the former monastery, guarding the artwork and discussing it with visitors. Informal lessons such as these, and more formal training in high school and college Chicano/a art classes, gave people new tools for appreciating their heritage and for putting art in the service of the common good. The majority of those who participated in the Mexican American cultural activism of the 1960s and 1970s remained amateurs. They learned how to paint, dance, act, write, and sing, and they learned the history and interpretation of Chicano/a art. The movement inspired in them an enduring love of art, just as it instilled in many a lifelong commitment to public service. That was victory enough. Some movement artists, though, were able to make a career out of their creativity, including: Jesus Treviño, Moctezuma Esparza, and Sylvia Morales in film and television; Gronk, Malaquías Montoya, Yolanda Lopez, and Judy Baca in the visual arts; Rudolfo Anaya, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Norma Alarcón, Rolando Hinojosa, Ana Castillo, and Juan Felipe Herrera in literature; Luis Valdez in theater; and Mark Guerrero in music. The list goes on. Indeed, an argument could be made that the cultural sphere is where the Chicano movement has enjoyed its most obvious success. In 2010, LACMA hosted a retrospective exhibit on Asco, celebrating the spray-paint piece they

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scrubbed off their building in 1972. The museum’s change of heart suggests just how far Chicano/a art has come. Elegies for the Chicano movement only make sense inasmuch as they either ignore or downplay the Chicano/a cultural politics of the last thirty years. In his 1996 survey of Chicano/a studies at the twilight of the twentieth century, historian Ignacio M. García complained that the field had become “an academically anemic stepchild of higher education.”94 García placed much of the blame for this impasse on an unholy trinity of “lesbian-feminism, neo-Marxism, and a militant form of Latinoism” that, in his view, undid the militant “spirit” of the “Plan de Santa Barbara,” the 1969 manifesto that issued the first call for Chicano-studies programs.95 He was particularly pointed in his discussion of a “small but influential” group of “gender nationalists” who cause division among activists by “find[ing] the lurking ‘macho’ in every Chicano scholarly work.”96 Together with the middle-class scholars, male and female, who work absent any connection to the barrio, these radical feminists are, according to García, selling out the movement’s principled commitment to community service and ethnic empowerment. Feminists do not spend their time hunting for gender bias in everything they read, but when they see it, they call it what it is. For a long time now, queer politics and feminism have been the main engines moving progressive Chicano/a politics forward. Scholar-activists such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba have used their writings and their classrooms to change how society thinks about Chicano/a history and U.S. history. Their work has influenced what kinds of policies get set in government and in civil society. Queers and feminists have also built effective community-based organizations such as San Antonio’s Fuerza Unida (United Force) and San Francisco’s Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida (Project Anti-AIDS for Life, now called El/La para TransLatinas).97 Progressive activism of this sort helps women and men, gays and straights, but a philosophy impaired by sexism and homophobia prompts García to interpret it as a betrayal of the Chicano movement, rather than as its evolution. Lorena Oropeza argues in a published rebuttal that García’s commentary does not reflect mainstream opinion within Chicano/a studies.98 This is fortunately true. There are many stories in circulation of activists who were once uncomfortable with homosexuality embracing gay and lesbian rights. The artist Barbara Carrasco, for example, was forced to confront the homophobia she inherited from her conservative Catholic education after César Chávez asked her to represent the UFW at a Pride parade in Hollywood in the 1970s.99 However, there is a second

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dimension to García’s essay that deserves closer attention, as it speaks directly to more common anxieties about the role of the university—and with it, culture—in political change. García argues that the generation of scholars who followed the “Chicano” generation of the 1960s and 1970s has become complicit in a system of higher education that rewards intellectual conformity and careerism over community and engaged scholarship. “Since the end of the major Chicano activism of the 1960s and 1970s,” he writes, “scholarly ties to the community have declined as scholars concentrate on gaining tenure and promotion, or on building networks with politicians and educational lobby groups who are politically correct and who offer opportunities for professional enhancement.”100 García is right to critique the managerialism of the American academy. Administrators at colleges and universities across the country obsess over their rankings, all the while using PR buzzwords like “efficiency” and “flexibility” to cut salaries and scale back programs that fail to turn a profit, even successful ones. He is wrong, though, in his estimation of contemporary Chicano/a scholarship. Amid ongoing resistance by bureaucrats and conservative politicians, intellectuals in Chicano/a studies (and the field of Latino/a studies more broadly) are carrying forward the principle found in the “Plan de Santa Barbara” that says “higher education must contribute to the formation of a complete man [sic] who truly values life and freedom.” In addition to producing innovative research across the humanities and the social sciences, scholars are organizing locally, nationally, and internationally on behalf of democratic values. MALCS has played an important role in drawing attention to the brutal patterns of violence against women in Ciudad Juárez. The journal Latino Studies regularly publishes a “Vivencias” section that engages grassroots struggles and publishes interviews with community leaders. The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) continues to mobilize against H.B. 2281, a bill signed in May 2010 that bans ethnic studies in Arizona on the false pretense of preventing hate speech. Most importantly, undergraduate students on campuses throughout the United States are involved in progressive politics, lately leading the fight for passage of a federal “Dream Act” that would grant legal residency to undocumented citizens who entered the country as children. As in the 1960s and 1970s, these young activists form a vanguard, rather than a majority.101 They have been effective, though. In 2011, students at the University of Maryland were pivotal in persuading the General Assembly to pass a state-level Dream Act.

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García misinterprets the development of Chicano/a studies—and with it, Chicano/a politics—because of misplaced anxieties about the university. He argues that Chicano/a studies has lost its “relevance” to Mexican American communities, and he castigates certain unnamed “Chicano scholars” who have “been involved in an intellectual voyeurism that sounds progressive but has little relationship to . . . everyday problems.”102 García’s impressive publication record makes clear his commitment to higher education, but as happens sometimes among activists, García seems more comfortable with revolution than with governance. A measure of unease about institutionalization is understandable, even healthy. As Stuart Hall once argued against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, scholars should feel a “necessary modesty” about their scholarship. He insisted, though, on the “deadly seriousness” of intellectual work as a whole, including specialized terrains such as cultural studies and critical theory, because it can illuminate “certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death.”103 The university cannot be replaced as the location for this kind of cultural labor. Because higher education does not—or should not—revolve around the profit motive, students and researchers have more freedom than those in the private sector to take the long view on complex social and political issues. Also, because of the vitally important tenure system, members of the academy have more independence than politicians to ask hard questions and defend controversial arguments. Paradoxically, the university derives its highest value to society precisely through its studied detachment from other social spheres, including grassroots activism. While never absolute, this detachment is essential. Indeed, the fact that the Chicano movement has experienced many of its most lasting successes in education and in the arena of cultural politics is not at all a disappointment. To be sure, culture should never become the exclusive focus of progressive activism. Social problems related to economics, transportation, migration, health, sexuality, criminal justice, and war are multidimensional and must be approached from a variety of angles. Yet to ignore the cultural aspects of these issues is to ignore their origins and, quite often, their real remedy. For example, opposition to undocumented immigration rests more on misconceptions about Latin American “backwardness” than it does on reasoned policy positions. The immigrant rights struggle—the most urgent area of contemporary Chicano/a politics—therefore requires both legislative and cultural strategies, which is to say there must be a reforming of the imagination before

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there can be meaningful political reform, to say nothing of revolution. People must come to think of migrants differently, to think of America differently, to think of the world differently. Art is sometimes trivialized as flowery adornment to the real work of politics. But as Edward J. McCaughan puts it: “Artists . . . are attuned to important sensory and emotional data about the human experience that are often overlooked by activist policymakers and political strategists who place greater stock in readily observable, quantifiable phenomena. Deeply engaged in the symbolic, artists are often better able to fully appreciate the cultural processes by which people attribute meaning to social reality through representation.”104 There can be no politics, no movement without art. The following chapters turn to art and literature as a way of telling a different story about the Chicano movement and its place in contemporary politics. Each chapter focuses on a different cultural medium. Chapter 1 (“Antennas and Mimeograph Machines: Postwar Mass Media and the Chicano/a Street Press”) offers an unprecedented study of television’s reductive news coverage of the Chicano movement. Through careful use of archival evidence, I argue that network journalists at NBC and elsewhere interpreted Chicano/a activism as yet another racialized threat to an imaginary postwar consensus. Mindful of the culture industry’s growing power, activists responded with the creation of an independent Chicano/a media that used mimeograph machines, offset printing, and other available media technologies to circulate alternative images and narratives of Mexican America. This Chicano/a media took many different expressions, including film, television, radio, and other forms of communication. But the printed word was its most vital instrument because print was accessible, and because print allowed creator and audience to imagine themselves as part of a Chicano/a nation. The Chicano/a press became a foundation for the cultural politics of the Chicano movement, and an important inspiration and guide for contemporary Chicano/a politics. Chapter 2 (“Green Aztlán: Environmentalism and the Chicano/a Visual Arts”) looks at the visual arts and their imagining of a distinctive Chicano/a environmentalism founded on the union of social justice and ecological protection. The historical period that some commentators identify (shortsightedly, in my view) as the peak of the Chicano movement was the same period in which environmentalism entered the political mainstream. The first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970. Around this same moment, the UFW was organizing its boycott of nonunion lettuce; activists were taking concrete steps toward the creation of

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a Chicano/a third party; and Mexican American women were engaged in laying the foundation for independent feminist organizations. Like many of their generational peers, Chicanos/as worried about the damage that runaway consumerism was doing to ecosystems across the globe. They were wary, though, of the leading environmentalist organizations. Not only did groups such as the Sierra Club draw too sharp a distinction between the needs of human and nonhuman nature; they also frequently endorsed the popular “zero population growth” movement and its antiimmigrant agenda. Mexican Americans therefore began developing a distinctive Chicano/a environmentalism that united social and ecological justice. The visual arts became an important part of this initiative. As the portfolio of distinguished Chicana artist Santa Barraza makes apparent, painting and other visual media have been effective tools for pushing back against racism within the environmentalist movement, and also for inviting audiences to imagine economies that are healthier for all living things. Chapter 3 (“Immigrant Actos: Citizenship and Performance in El Teatro Campesino”) studies the celebrated theater collective El Teatro Campesino and its staging of a “performative citizenship” that challenged the inhumanity of U.S. immigration law. The backdrop to this challenge was what historian Mae Ngai calls the “regime of immigration restriction” that began in the 1920s and continues into the twentyfirst century.105 For decades after the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, movement between Mexico and the United States was largely unimpeded. Racial fears stoked by immigration from Asia and by World War I led to the establishment of the Border Patrol in 1924 and to the passage that same year of the Johnson-Reed Act, which created an unprecedented system of preferences that “drew a new ethnic and racial map based on new categories and hierarchies of difference.”106 The liberal Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 put an end to the race-based quota system, but it did little to challenge the legal and cultural figuration of the nonwhite immigrant as a security threat. The improvised actos, or skits, of El Teatro Campesino enacted both for audiences and for performers an alternative form of belonging based not on papers—or papeles, as they are known among Spanish-speaking migrants—but on the power of creative labor. Though El Teatro Campesino has changed dramatically since its days as the creative arm of the farmworker movement, its vision of a more inclusive and more just citizenship still matters, particularly in view of the anti-immigrant politics that followed 9/11.

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Chapter 4 (“After Words: Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo and the Evolution of Chicano/a Cultural Politics”) offers a close reading of Sandra Cisneros’s 2002 novel as evidence of the progress made in Chicano/a politics after the 1960s. Often the narrative of movement decline suggests that feminism was somehow to blame for the collapse of el movimiento Chicano. Feminists have occasionally reinforced this narrative by suggesting that Chicana feminism was a response to the failures of Chicano nationalism. Caramelo tells a different story. Through Celaya Reyes, the protagonist of the novel, Cisneros suggests that the progressive politics at the heart of the Chicano movement was and is threatened by sexism and homophobia, not by feminism. Her novel champions a different nationalism than the chauvinist version that too often dominated Chicano/a politics during the 1960s and 1970s. This feminist nationalism celebrates the pleasures of cultural heritage, but it refuses to make women the servants of tradition, or demand that gays and lesbians sacrifice their desires for the sake of the heterosexual family. And while Cisneros’s nationalist narrative is rooted in the histories of Mexicans north and south of the border, it branches out and becomes a transnational story that honors the many connections between Chicanos/as and other peoples, including the Arab communities that have been bombarded by racism and military violence in the wake of September 11. Celaya’s multilayered coming-of-age story figures the contemporary Chicano movement as a feminist struggle for a grassroots globalization built on the recognition of cultural, legal, and economic rights for all people. There are many people who believe that the civil rights moment in American history is over. They think that racism was fixed once and for all with the legal reforms of the 1960s. Some even naively believe that the pendulum has swung the other way, leaving white people more vulnerable to discrimination than minorities. The reality is that many of the political and economic issues confronted by civil rights activists persist, and some, such as income inequality, have worsened. But progressive mobilizing has persisted as well. Taken together, the following chapters tell the story of a Chicano movement that has evolved since the 1960s to become a diverse and abiding presence in progressive politics. Like any story, it has protagonists and antagonists, tragedy and comedy, irony, plot twists, narrative tension, climaxes, and dénouements. Commentators from across the political spectrum have declared the Chicano movement and other social movements of the 1960s dead. Though they rage against the damage done, conservatives celebrate this death and hope it signals a return to an earlier world they misguidedly

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see as safer and more decent. For their part, liberals and leftists alike mourn the passing of the 1960s as a utopian experiment cut short in its prime. Latinos/as—like African Americans—have experienced an overall decline in their collective welfare since the 1970s, and are measurably worse off than non-Hispanic whites, most of whom have also faced stagnant wages and rising costs. The 2009 American Community Survey indicated that the poverty rate for nonwhite Hispanics was 23.3 percent, compared to 25.5 percent for non-Hispanic blacks and 9.9 percent for non-Hispanic whites.107 Native-born Latino/a households earn an average of $44,000 per year, and the foreign-born earn $37,000. NonHispanic white households earn an average of $55,000. (Non-Hispanic blacks average an unconscionable $33,500 per year.) Approximately 31 percent of Hispanics are without health insurance, compared to 19.1 percent of non-Hispanic blacks and 10.9 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Homeownership rates for Hispanic households are also inequitable, at 48.1 percent compared to 44.7 percent for non-Hispanic blacks and 72.9 percent for non-Hispanic whites. Things have improved over the last several decades for the members of a relatively small Latino/a middle and upper class, many of whom identify as white: the percentage of Latino/a households earning more than $75,000 annually (in 2005 dollars adjusted for inflation) went from 10.2 percent in 1980 to 19.4 percent in 2005.108 However, for many Latinos/as—especially those who are first-generation, Spanish-speaking, and brown- or black-skinned— things are getting worse, not better. This is the bad news. The good news is that the progressive social movements that set the political agenda during 1960s have continued their fight in the decades since. Their accomplishments are impressive, particularly in the realm of social values. Gays and lesbians have won wider political and legal recognition for their communities. Their struggle against a powerful culture of shame around sexuality benefits heterosexuals as well. Feminists have expanded the professional and personal choices available to women through their support for affirmative action and through education. They have also protected the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, despite well-funded conservative opposition to women’s autonomy. The civil rights struggle—which includes the Chicano movement—put an end to formal segregation and led to increasing diversity throughout public and private institutions. Environmentalism prompted reform of the government’s management of ecological resources, and it also inspired a growing initiative in the public sphere toward more sustainable models of consumption.

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Conservatives have mobilized effectively during the past several decades. They are fond of portraying their movement as a reaction to the imagined excesses of 1960s liberalism, but it is in fact merely an extension of the hidebound politics of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. When Republicans have won at the state or national level—and they have won plenty—it has often been by framing the progressive campaigns of the mid-twentieth century as destructive, ineffective, or, perhaps worse, irrelevant. The frame is as ruinous as it is wrong. The 1960s didn’t make everything better. The skepticism toward government created by Watergate and by the lies surrounding Vietnam has increased voter apathy and led to disinvestment in public programs. Infighting among progressive organizations crippled many of them before they could develop and sustain a critique of the neoliberal economic policies that have enriched a few and harmed so many. In the absense of any credible alternative to corporate capitalism, income inequality has soared. But through all of this, Chicano/a activists have joined with progressive allies to imagine better futures. Art has been an indispensible tool, in the 1960s and in the decades since.

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Antennas and Mimeograph Machines: Postwar Mass Media and the Chicano/a Street Press

On August 30, 1972, a small group of young Chicano/a activists invaded Catalina Island. Their move was part of what they called the Marcha de la Reconquista, a three-month “Reconquest March” aimed at drawing attention to the long history of discrimination against Mexicans in America. Dressed in combat boots, khaki uniforms, and their signature cap, the contingent of Brown Berets raised a Mexican flag over the Avalon harbor and claimed to retake the popular American locale on behalf of Mexico. Anxious to avoid a televised confrontation, local authorities initially tolerated the group. After several weeks, though, on September 23, the Berets obeyed a police order to leave the island or face trespassing changes. The Chicano invasion of Catalina was over.1 This largely forgotten moment in the history of the Chicano movement is suggestive of the ambiguous legal, cultural, and political position that Mexican Americans occupy within the imaginary of the United States, an uncertain “third space” of a population at once not quite native and not quite alien. Ascending the hillside in their military garb, the young radicals looked the part of Cuban-style invaders. And yet they recalled a time on this same soil when the United States was the conqueror, and Mexicans the conquered. The Catalina episode also says something about mass media, for it illustrates the shortcomings of the network news in a period that many celebrate as television’s golden age. During the 1950s and early 1960s, NBC and CBS earned a reputation for quality journalism through their coverage of the postwar black civil rights movement.2 The two major networks said close to nothing,

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though, about the Mexican American civil rights movement happening at exactly the same time. Journalists ignored important stories such as the massive school walkouts in Los Angeles in 1968 and the 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver. Yet the Catalina story—a minor episode in the chronology of the Chicano movement by any measure— was broadcast on the August 31, 1972, episode of the CBS Evening News. At the close of that night’s program, Walter Cronkite reported that “a group of militant Mexican-Americans” had “staged a peaceful invasion of Catalina Island.”3 He seemed to fight back a dismissive smirk as he reassured his audience that “everybody at least so far seems to be taking the invasion quite peacefully.”4 CBS’s refusal to explore the issues surrounding this event was consistent with the generally flawed coverage of the Chicano movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Footage of Chicano/a activism during this period has never been examined before, partly because much of it has been lost or is locked up in network vaults, but also because the Chicano movement is only now becoming part of the narrative of left activism in the mid-twentieth century. Incomplete though it is, the archive raises crucial questions about how mass media shaped the cultural politics of the Chicano movement, for good and for bad.5 What informed network decision making about which stories involving Chicanos/as to cover and which to ignore? How did viewers at home respond to the images of the Chicano movement that were available to them? What was the impact of commercials on network representation of the Chicano movement? How has the historical memory of the movement been shaped by the camera? And, centrally, how did Chicanos/as respond to their consistent marginalization in mainstream media? Television was introduced to the American public in 1939 at the World’s Fair in New York. Between that moment and 1965—when César Chávez drew unprecedented media attention with his announcement of the historic farmworker strike in California—there was a near “brownout” on televised news about Mexican Americans. This was an era that saw bold and insightful coverage of civil rights activism in the South. Yet the networks gave scant attention to similar patterns of activism in the Southwest. This failure emerged from the ideological and geographical limitations of the media machine, but it also reflected a cultural tendency to view Chicanos/as as intruders to the nation’s primordial conflict between black and white. It was a cause for celebration that the networks began to cover the story of the UFW grape strike in 1966. But as important as the media attention

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was for the cause, it became part of a visual contrast that represented Mexican Americans not as complex human subjects, but as suffering saints or as dangerous radicals. Historically, whites had used this kind of contrast to legitimize slavery and segregation, depicting blacks either as lawless savages or as naïve children. Television modified the template in its coverage of Chicano/a activism, but the distorting effect was largely the same. Because of the labor leader’s skillful manipulation of the television industry’s desire for a hero figure, Chávez became a widely respected public icon and helped win new economic and political rights for agricultural laborers. However, things changed quickly. By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, audiences wanted more sensational television. Nixon was remaking the political landscape, convincing whites that the civil rights movement had been hijacked by violent extremists. Footage of the Chicano movement was soon dominated by images of riot and rebellion. Chicano/a activists were increasingly represented as threats to a nation defined not as the people in the streets exercising their democratic rights, but as a “silent majority” sitting its living room amid the comforts of American abundance. The effect of this ideological contrast was profound. Television was not the only medium to shape public understanding of the Chicano civil rights movement, but the nightly news enjoyed unparalleled power when it came to setting the news agenda and framing public opinion. Between 1965 and 1975, television advanced the farmworker cause by exposing the miserable labor conditions at the nation’s food factories, and also by persuading the public that the lives of farmworkers mattered. But shallow coverage of the Chicano movement left most viewers unaware of the rich complexity of Mexican American history and politics. It also kept the Chicano movement from becoming part of the popular narrative of postwar civil rights activism. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Left was developing a sophisticated critique of the media industry and its place in U.S. society. SDS’s Port Huron Statement, for example, had sophisticated commentary on how communication technologies were being used to head off real reform in an unequal society. Mexican Americans followed this discussion because it spoke to their experiences. Blocked from participation in the dominant public sphere by racism, they developed a grassroots Chicano/a media that answered stereotypes and allowed individuals to become cultural producers. This independent media universe included film, TV, and radio, but its most vital medium was print. The mimeograph machine and the offset printer became essential tools in the struggle for cultural rights and economic justice.

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Television journalists then as now touted their product as the official “first draft” of the American experience, but a retrospective look at footage of the Chicano movement gives reason to reconsider the idealized narrative about the broadcast news. Films like Good Night, and Good Luck perpetuate the myth of the 1960s as a journalistic Eden, a time when mass media was more than the idle gossip and partisan yelling that dominates today’s corporate media universe. Certainly there were examples of real insight during this period. But because of the technical limits of a twenty-three-minute program and the political limits of a monopoly system funded by corporate advertisers and supervised by government regulators, it was rare for producers during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to stray beyond consensus viewpoints. Coverage of the Chicano movement shows how television can shape public perception, sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. However, the significance of this archive lies ultimately in what it says about political priorities. Visibility is often equated with power in our “society of the spectacle,” but there are limits to defining what is meaningful as what can be seen. Racism is often defined in its most spectacular forms: dead and wounded bodies, segregated facilities, or unbearable labor conditions. These are deplorable, but many forms of social injury are woven into the fabric of everyday life, and their banality makes them hard to communicate through the surface of the television screen. Likewise, television cannot picture many of the things for which progressives fight: the opportunity to do meaningful work; the freedom for communities and individuals to live where they want; control over the health of our own bodies; and the chance to learn. Network coverage of the Chicano movement teaches a great deal about the cultural politics surrounding civil rights struggles. Its most important lesson, though, might be that what matters most in politics, as in life, is what happens when cameras are not around.

“Uncle Walter” and Postwar Chicano/a Activism The television news made an inauspicious start at the dawn of the television age. The newsreel had shown the enormous journalistic potential of the moving image, but inaugural programs like the Camel News Caravan on NBC or Douglas Edwards with the News on CBS were dry and superficial bulletin services. News divisions were understaffed. The broadcasts were given only fifteen minutes on the programming grid. Oversized camera equipment and a lack of on-location staff made it

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impossible for crews to catch late-breaking stories. Broadcasts were comprised mostly of recycled newsreel footage or coverage of preplanned events. However, by 1965—the year that the National Farm Workers Association launched its historic grape strike and the year sometimes cited as the beginning of the Chicano movement—the network news had become a driving force in politics.6 The television industry had achieved major advances in technology, including satellite broadcasting and slow motion. Newsmen like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow had been transformed into trusted personalities. Producers were experimenting with new camera techniques and more dramatic storytelling so they could compete with print journalism. The story that established the evening news as the nation’s journalistic authority was the struggle for integration in the South. There was a painful irony in this fact, since the networks had largely ignored the story of black civil rights activism during the 1940s and the early part of the 1950s. TV producers typically followed the editorial lead of the printed press, and since white newspapers ignored post–World War II organizing among African Americans, so did television.7 Not until the mid-1950s did the networks pick up the story of the emerging civil rights movement, but when they did, they changed the course of American law and history. Producers were committed enough to the dramatic story of the 1955 trial of Emmett Till’s killers that they turned a field not far from the courthouse into an airstrip so they could fly footage to New York for broadcasting.8 Two years later, images of the violent drama surrounding the integration of Little Rock schools attracted an even larger audience, becoming the first news story in television history to become a nationwide media spectacle.9 In 1963, television coverage of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom made MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech an instant classic of American rhetoric. Television coverage of civil rights was a complex dance. Sasha Torres argues that civil rights workers and network news producers reached something of an unspoken agreement with each other. Television provided the spotlight needed for activists to resist southern bigotry. In exchange, African American leaders provided the compelling visuals that networks needed to demonstrate their gravitas and to become the new record of the nation’s history.10 Civil rights activism in the South was crucial to the formation of the Chicano movement, as many young Chicanos and Chicanas who were first moved to get involved in politics through the example of King, Rosetta Parks, Bob Moses, and other black leaders.11 There are no

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transcripts of how Mexican Americans reacted in their living rooms to the March on Washington, but activists have described coverage of black activism as a catalyst for their involvement in postwar Chicano/a politics. F. Arturo Rosales writes that he was stationed at a U.S. Air Force base in Birmingham, England, when he read newspaper coverage of what was going on in the South: I had dropped out of high school and was not particularly politicized. But I read in British newspapers and in the Stars and Stripes that, back home Black children were killed when a church was bombed, that civil rights workers were slain and that Bull Conners [sic] turned dogs loose on peaceful demonstrators. To my dismay and discomfort, some white sergeants openly delighted in this terrorism.12 Rosales identified with the black civil rights movement. He saw the inherent fairness of the cause, and he also saw parallels between what was happening to African Americans and what happened to Chicanos/ as in his native Arizona. Rosales’s experience speaks to the important and still underexplored connections between black and Chicano/a activism after World War II. But the connections Rosales saw were ignored by the news industry. The archives of the early decades of television are incomplete. Not fully aware of the archive’s value to history, networks recycled film to lower costs. Some material is available, though, via print description, spotty preservation by the networks, and good luck. A search of CBS and NBC records indicates that only a small handful of reports involving Mexican Americans were aired before the September 1965 farmworker strike. These reports typically involved alleged drug smuggling at the border, the controversial Bracero Program, or unauthorized immigration by Mexican nationals. Exceptions did exist. For example, the September 27, 1960, premier of the ABC series Bell and Howell Close Up! examined discrimination against blacks, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, Chicanos, and Native Americans in selected communities across the United States.13 But apart from one or two isolated examples, the first two decades of television history saw a “brownout” on coverage of Chicano/a and Latino/a affairs.14 A person watching television in the 1950s and early 1960s was more likely to see news about Mexicans in Mexico than about Mexicans in the United States. The State Department had considerable clout in setting the news agenda and frequently used television to project an image of concern to nonaligned countries in Latin America.

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Chicanos/as were treated as cultural foreigners but not legal ones, which meant the State Department had no interest in them.15 Why was media coverage of Chicano/a issues so poor during the early years of television, especially given the networks’ success with the black civil rights movement? The causes of this failure were both institutional and cultural. Stories about Mexican Americans were excluded from what Gaye Tuchman calls “the news net,” the collection of wire services, bureaus, and other news-gathering practices that provide media organizations with their material and create the audience perception of what is newsworthy.16 With its promise of “catching” all of the meaningful stories on any particular day, the news net makes an implicit claim to universality. Yet in the 1940s and 1950s—and even today—the major networks lacked reporters with experience in covering Chicano stories. Few, if any, Mexican Americans worked as journalists or producers in mainstream media outlets, and white journalists—especially those on the East Coast, away from large concentrations of Chicanos/as—had slender exposure to Mexican American issues during their schooling. Newsmakers therefore didn’t recognize Chicano/a stories as newsworthy. At best they were interpreted as regional items or as human-interest stories. The news industry is more proactive now that the Latino/a population is growing, but coverage still tends toward cultural exoticism. These institutional dynamics were bound up with larger social realities. News organizations generally treated the eastern seaboard as the locus of national news, even as the nation’s economy and demography was shifting west. This tendency reflects the simple fact that the news industry is headquartered in New York and looks at power from a topdown perspective, but it is also reflects the colonial habit of seeing the Southwest as empty space. Mary Pat Brady argues that nineteenthand early-twentieth century fiction, poetry, and journalism depicted the former Mexican territories of the United States as barren land.17 In order to clear the way for capitalist development of the region’s natural resources, Native American and mexicano communities were culturally and sometimes physically eradicated. Television’s failure to cover postwar Mexican American politics emerges from this history. Newsmakers knew that the black civil rights movement would make for captivating television because the story could be sutured into the nation’s psychosocial drama of black versus white, freedom versus slavery—a drama that Toni Morrison says is only related by indirection to the lives of actually existing African Americans.18 Coverage of the black civil rights movement allowed viewers to indulge in the fantasy of U.S. exceptionalism,

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to watch a “more perfect union” unfold before their eyes. The Chicano movement did not offer similar narrative pleasures, for while African Americans have always been central to the nation’s founding mythologies—often through negation—Mexican Americans have routinely been detained at the border between exclusion and inclusion. Because the networks ignored Mexican American issues during the 1940s and 1950s, they missed stories of major significance to Chicano/a history and to American history more broadly. The trajectory of Mexican American politics after World War II was similar to that of African American politics. In fact, the two groups were often united together in multiethnic coalitions. Many activists—among them servicemen and servicewomen, as well as civilians who worked in the defense industry through Executive Order 8802—were unwilling to return to the segregated status quo The war, after all, had been fought in the name of democracy. Fifties-era anticommunism did considerable damage to the progressive infrastructure that existed among Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, but groups like the Community Service Organization, the Asociación Nacional México-Americana (National Mexican-American Association), the Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española (Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples), and the Mexican American Political Association built on a civil rights tradition that reached back to the 1930s and into the nineteenth century.19 Activists fought for union rights, educational opportunities, affordable housing, and equal employment. There were many defeats, but there were also several major victories. In 1947, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Mendez v. Westminster School District that segregated “Mexican schools” were unconstitutional. Thurgood Marshall later cited this case as precedent in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In 1949, Mexican Americans protested the decision of a segregated funeral home in Three Rivers, Texas, to refuse service to the family of the war hero Felix Longoria. With the assistance of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Longoria was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Hernandez v. Texas that Mexican Americans were eligible for the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment. A nationwide fund-raising drive on Spanish-language radio and in Spanish-language newspapers helped pay legal expenses in the case. At the end of each broadcast, Walter Cronkite told his viewers, “that’s the way it is.” His signature sign-off was meant to assure viewers that not only could he be trusted, but also that television could be trusted. Yet CBS and its rivals ignored stories about Mexican Americans, and

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what coverage they did have was one-dimensional. The news brownout did not stop Mexican Americans from organizing, but it did have an impact. Chicano/a organizations of this era faced tremendous obstacles in getting established. Often they shut down prematurely because they lacked the cultural and political capital that media attention sometimes provides. The television industry also became complicit in the construction of a popular narrative that suggests Mexican Americans were quiescent in the 1940s and 1950s. Chicanos/as were actively organizing during these years, but the mainstream media’s failure to cover this activism makes it seem as if 1960s activism appeared out of nowhere. Chicanos/as and other Latino/a communities are still denied knowledge of an important chapter in their political history. They are not alone: Chicano/a history belongs to everyone, which means everyone is hurt by its erasure.

Televising el Movimiento Joined by Dolores Huerta, César Chávez established the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) in 1962 after a successful career with the Community Service Organization, a group that used Alinsky methods to increase Mexican American voter turnout. Frustrated by the CSO’s unwillingness to organize farmworkers, Chávez formed the NFWA to win labor protections for a group whose past attempts to organize were often met with violent repression. In the early years of the union, Chávez drove up and down California’s Central Valley, introducing himself to farmworkers, surveying their needs and opinions, and enrolling members. Chávez wanted to do this nontelegenic but necessary groundwork for several years before declaring a strike, but when the Filipino farmworkers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee stopped work in September 1965, Chávez saw an opportunity. NFWA leaders quickly organized a vote, and on September 16, 1965, the members launched the huelga (strike). They received little media attention in their first months on the picket line, but in spring of 1966, the television networks picked up the story of the farmworkers’ historic campaign. Looking to pressure Governor Pat Brown into supporting the strike, Chávez had organized a three-hundred-mile pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento. NBC ran a national report on the April 10 Easter Day rally on the grounds of the state capitol. Media attention helped the farmworkers win a contract with Schenley Industries, a winemaker and liquor distributor eager to avoid negative publicity.20 Their victory marked the first time

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that California farmworkers had won a union contract, and only the second time in U.S. history. Farmworkers continued their strike, and in 1968 they launched a national grape boycott to bolster their efforts. TV coverage of the pickets and of the boycott helped make Chávez the only widely visible Chicano/a leader. The camera’s attraction to César Chávez was not accidental. Chávez had learned from Martin Luther King Jr. the power of nonviolence, and he also had studied King’s masterful use of television as a political weapon, discovering early in his career just how powerful television could be. In 1959, during one of his first efforts to organize farm laborers, Chávez arranged for local news crews in Oxnard, California, to film workers setting fire to a barrel of job referrals being given illegally to Mexican braceros. The coverage prompted local officials to raise wages and give hiring preference to eligible workers.21 When the NFWA went on strike in 1965, Chávez continued to pursue creative ways to exploit media for the sake of la causa (the cause). The 1966 pilgrimage proved that the public could be won over to the farmworker side if they saw a glimpse of the realities in the field. By far the most successful example of Chávez using the camera to further the cause was his twenty-five-day fast in the spring of 1968. Negotiations were at an impasse and tensions were running high inside the union. Chávez felt he needed to do something dramatic to refocus his energies and the energies of the union. At first he didn’t tell anyone about the fast, but news spread quickly. Soon it had become an international media event. On March 10, as his health declined, a frail Chávez ended his fast by taking communion in front of national television cameras with his wife, Helen, and with Senator and soon-to-be presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.22 Each man stood to gain something from the event: Chávez gained clout with the liberal establishment, and Kennedy gained credibility with young idealists. The footage became an iconic part of U.S. history when Kennedy was assassinated three short months later, with Chávez standing near him on the stage of the Ambassador Hotel. Chávez insisted throughout his life that he paid no attention to his public image. This strategy was wise because it preempted claims by his political enemies that he was pandering to the camera. About his famous fast, for example, Chávez said it was for himself, not for the sake of the public. Chávez was sincere in his religious convictions, but he knew from experience that he could leverage the power of the camera. Chávez played on stereotypes of the image of the “humble Mexican” to allay fears

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figure 1.1. CBS Evening News, August 30, 1968

about the other Latin stereotype, the figure of the revolutionary. He also exploited the media’s infatuation with martyrs. Chávez secured national media attention by transforming his body into a racialized spectacle of suffering, just as King, the Little Rock Nine, and many others had been doing in the South. Sasha Torres argues that these civil rights spectacles made for such powerful television because they demonstrated the new medium’s seeming ability to take the viewer directly to the scene and to show unfiltered reality. As activists performed scenes of injury, viewers—primarily but not exclusively white—indulged in a fantasy of cutting through the mythologies around race and grasping at long last the truth of what it meant to be black or brown.23 To use Zora Neale Hurston’s memorable phrase, television seemed to provide a window on “how it feels to be colored me.” Most Americans knew far less about exploitation in the fields of California than they did about segregation in the South. Still, Chávez’s media strategy garnered the most extensive news coverage of any single Mexican American activist, before or after. The coverage in 1968 of Chávez’s fast represented the pinnacle of his career as a media icon, for it was through this spectacle of suffering that Chávez’s body was transformed into a symbol of the suffering of the farmworker and, more broadly, of the burden of being brown. More coverage followed, though. In August 1968, CBS gave an update on the grape strike, showing footage of protesters outside of grocery stores and interviewing Chávez in Boston, where UFW supporters

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re-created the Tea Party by throwing containers of grapes into the harbor. The NBC program The Frank McGee Report dedicated an episode to the program in May 1969, and on September 29, 1969, Chávez employed a new strategy, courting support for the union by warning viewers about the dangers of pesticides.24 Coverage expanded in the early 1970s. Between 1970 and 1973, the three major television networks broadcast almost fifty segments on the union. There were several new developments: the signing of major contracts in the summer of 1970; the lettuce strike that began that same year; the violent campaign by the management-friendly Teamsters to sabotage the UFW; Chávez’s arrest for refusing a court order to suspend the boycott; the union leader’s participation in the 1972 elections; and the murder of farmworker Juan de La Cruz in 1973. There was coverage in later years, including reports on Chávez’s 1988 fast against pesticide use, and news of his death in April 1993. But Chávez never again enjoyed the levels of visibility he had in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Network coverage of the huelga was a pivotal part of the UFW’s success in organizing farm labor. But the invention of César Chávez as the first and only Chicano “civil rights subject” created problems as well.25 The main problem was that it undermined the decision-making process about leadership in the movement. Television is an intimate medium. Shows come into the home and become part of a person’s everyday routine, causing viewers to gravitate to characters—be they fictional or nonfictional—who are exceptional in their personality but common in their outlook. TV in this way exacerbates the tendency in social movements toward a top-down model of leadership that depends on the charismatic individual. Chávez often said that the farmworkers themselves were the soul of the union. For many years this was true, but the cameras tried to turn Chávez’s charisma into the cornerstone of the entire struggle. Chávez was so inundated with publicity demands that he was unable to do the more important work of organizing. The grassroots leadership that actually powered the movement was obscured, including the contributions of women like Dolores Huerta, who negotiated contracts, and Marion Moses, the union nurse. Women leaders do not fit the role of the masculine “messiah,” and so they rarely become movement ambassadors. The media was not solely to blame for the autocratic structure that undid the UFW. As the union grew, so did Chávez’s unwillingness to share authority. In 1977 he got involved with Synanon, and his zeal for the cultish organization chased away many of the UFW’s most talented leaders. Television, though, played an important part in this conflict because it fostered a polarizing cult of personality around Chávez.26

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Television also flattened the Chicano movement, stripping it of its historicity and making it seem like an irrational outburst. The activism of the 1960s and 1970s continued a political tradition that dated back to the mutualistas (mutual-aid societies) of the early 1900s, and before that the subaltern resistance that followed the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Because time is money on the airwaves, network producers could not describe this history, even if they wanted to. Nor could they show the relationship between the different constituencies of the movement: feminists working to reform patriarchal traditions along egalitarian lines; prison inmates challenging racism in the criminal-justice system; urban activists fighting gentrification; and farmworkers striking for union recognition. The Chicano movement was a multilayered, reasoned response to decades of racial, cultural, and economic marginalization to the Anglo establishment. It looked different, though, to the viewer sitting at home watching the news. On June 3, 1969, ABC reported on a protest by Reies López Tijerina at the nomination hearing of Warren Burger.27 Tijerina had been active for more than ten years in efforts to win reparations for New Mexican Hispanos who had been robbed of their land by the American legal system, and on this day he attempted to make a citizen’s arrest of Burger. He harbored no illusion that he would succeed, but the failure of the political system to address Hispano concerns compelled Tijerina and the Alianza toward more theatrical and at times more dangerous tactics. Since ABC gave no background to the protest, Tijerina comes off as an extremist or, worse, as a lunatic. This incident was not an isolated example, either. Chicano/a activists were often framed on the television screen as rebels and malcontents.28 Indeed this framing represents the flip side of network representations of the Chicano movement during the 1960s and 1970s. There was in the Chicano movement a tiny minority open to the idea of using violence to accomplish political aims. José Angel Gutiérrez once gave a televised speech in which he advocating killing the gringo. It was clearly a rhetorical device meant to polarize the debate in the same way that black nationalists sought to undermine white supremacy through direct confrontation. Gutiérrez elsewhere explained that the “gringo” refers only to white racists, and he modeled producing change by working within the system. A small militant faction saw violence as more than a rhetorical tool. Following the police attack on protestors at the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, a wave of anonymous threats and sabotage hit East Los Angeles. An organization named the Chicano Liberation Front took responsibility, though it is impossible to rule out the possibility of FBI and LAPD

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involvement.29 Police subterfuge had a major impact on Chicano/a activism during the early 1970s, fostering a climate of suspicion and destroying organizations from within.30 Groups like the Chicano Liberation Front, the Zapata Liberation Front, and the August Twenty-Ninth Movement were the exception that proved the rule. The Chicano movement was a peaceful campaign modeled after the example of Martin Luther King Jr., Paulo Freire, Gandhi, and the liberation theology movement. However, the networks made it seem otherwise, not as part of a calculated conspiracy, but as a business calculus. Voter-registration drives, school breakfast programs, poetry workshops, job training, and legal-aid seminars do not make for entertaining television. So instead the networks ran stories about riots and revolution. There are clear historical parallels between the media’s handling of black activism and its handling of Chicano/a activism. Herman Gray says that “black people portrayed in news coverage of the civil rights and black power movements appeared either as decent but aggrieved blacks who simply wanted to become a part of the American dream, or as threats to the very notion of citizenship and nation.” The effects of this polarization have been disastrous, as Gray argues. It has created a political climate in which African Americans are separated into “good Negroes” who don’t need government handouts, and “bad Negroes” who drain public resources and create crime. Through the figure of what Sasha Torres calls “the civil rights subject undone,” the mass media has become complicit in the fiction that racism has ended and that African Americans have only themselves to blame for worsening circumstances.31 Mexican Americans were subject to the same reductive treatment. They were even sometimes linked to the specter of black rebellion. On August 31, 1970, the CBS Evening News reported on what it described as a national wave of violence against police officers. Reporter John Laurence first describes a raid on a Black Panther headquarters following the murder of a Philadelphia police officer. Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo gives an on-camera interview in which he decries the shootout as more evidence of America’s decline, but the Black Panthers are not allowed to respond, and neither are residents of the largely African American neighborhood.32 The segment then cuts to the story of four California police officers ambushed in what police Sergeant Lee Hayes thinks might be part of an imminent “revolution” being stirred up by “agitators that came out of this Chicano demonstration in Los Angeles.”33 Two days prior a massive antiwar rally in East Los Angeles had devolved into a

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bloody confrontation with the police. Hayes links the Riverside shootout with the Chicano Moratorium, asserting that rioters from L.A. “whipped our people up into doing it.” The sergeant provides no evidence, though, and no Mexican Americans are given an opportunity to comment. Reports like this stirred paranoia among many whites and among some minorities that the nation was being threatened by race radicals. Black and Chicano/a activism was represented as an inchoate attack on “law and order.” There were numerous other occasions when the Chicano movement was filtered through the lens of real or imagined violence. CBS coverage of the Catalina invasion is one example. On April 28, 1970, ABC reporter Gregory Jackson warned viewers that “a Mexican-American upheaval is gathering force in Southern Texas.”34 Playing on viewer fears of communist takeovers led by mustachioed Latins, Jackson adds that this insurgency will be led by José Angel Gutiérrez, “who looks like an accountant, but talks like a revolutionary.” A similar report ran on June 15, 1971, but this time it was “two days of rioting and burning” in Albuquerque by Mexican Americans, “many of them high on marijuana and drink.”35 The segment quotes city officials as saying that “hippie outsiders were behind the chaos,” though the reporter gives no basis for such a claim. Several months later, on August 1, 1972, ABC updated viewers on the April hijacking of Frontier Airlines Flight 737 by a man named Ricardo Chavez Ortiz, who claimed to have committed his crime in order to draw attention to the Chicano plight.36 Reporter Dick Shoemaker traveled into the barrio to do a melodramatic exposé of the conditions that motivated Chavez Ortiz to do what he did. He only hinted at the fact that Chavez Ortiz likely suffered from severe mental health problems and was a dubious spokesperson for the entire Mexican American population. The late 1960s was a period when the TV networks increasingly prided themselves on their objectivity. Yet their scant coverage of Chicano/a activism was edited in a way that predisposed the audience to accept the police interpretation of events over and against the perspectives of Chicanos/as. This dynamic appears most clearly in television footage of the Chicano Moratorium, one of the major milestones of the Chicano movement. On August 29, 1970, an estimated twenty-five thousand Mexican Americans and their allies assembled together at East L.A.’s Belvedere Park in protest against the Vietnam War.37 What began as a peaceful assembly devolved into violence, leaving more than 150 arrested, more than sixty injured, and three dead—including beloved Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar. All three major networks covered the event, but

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figure 1.2. ABC News, April 28, 1970

the relatively extensive reporting by NBC best shows how the networks privileged the police perspective over movement points of view. NBC’s first report was broadcast on August 30. It begins with reporter Frank Bourgholtzer giving viewers a brief on-camera exposition of what had taken place the day before. “Trouble began,” he says, when a few of the participants at the “spirited anti-war rally” were allegedly caught shoplifting at a neighborhood liquor store.38 Assuring audiences of police readiness, Bourgholzter says that “the police were called and the police quickly solved the problem at the Green Mill, but that small confrontation set off a chain of reactions that exploded into a wild and vicious riot throughout this Mexican American community.”39 By the time the voice-over finishes its recap, the visuals have shifted from the reporter’s direct address to footage of the riot itself. The viewer watches as police officers march in formation, first pushing against the crowd and then drawing back as rocks and other projectiles fly across the top half of the television screen. The voice-over stops, and for approximately thirty seconds the audience hears only the sounds of crowds shouting and the police calmly but forcefully giving directions through bullhorns. Visually, the scene is quite mesmerizing. Cut in are shots of individual protesters being subdued by police, street-level footage of burned-out storefronts, and aerial clips of smoke rising into skies of Los Angeles. The scene ends with a series of cinéma-véríte close-ups of crumbled buildings and broken glass in the gutter. The shots seem to

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suggest to viewers that while the police have calmed the violence for now, the threat remains. In the midst of this sequence is the voice of an angry man who yells from somewhere offscreen: “You guys, don’t forget you guys started this.”40 His comment signifies a powerful counternarrative of what happened that day. The official story was that police were responding to provocation, but the narrative among Chicanos/as was that police triggered the incident at Green Mill liquors in order to crush the peaceful protest. Still-unanswered questions about Salazar’s death added fuel to this narrative. The anonymous man’s voice get lost, though, amid sounds and images edited through the lens of what Aaron Doyle calls a “lawand-order ideology” that sees aggressive policing as the only remedy for a society being destroyed from within by its underclasses.41 Positioned behind police lines so as to protect the crew and add drama, the NBC cameras give the viewer an eye-level look at the riot. The images offer audiences the thrill of the police without any of the danger. Doyle notes that “simply being the watcher rather than watched puts one in a position of power.”42 By shooting the riot from the vantage point of the police and allowing viewers to look down the barrel of a gun, television producers invited viewers to indulge in a fantasy of domination. They were encouraged to see themselves as the unseen heroes in the social drama playing out on their screen. The law-and-order orientation of the riot footage itself was reinforced by editorial choices about who appears on camera to interpret the event. As in most reporting of the period, Chicanos/as were not allowed the opportunity to speak on camera and to give their account of what unfolded at the Moratorium. Mexican Americans were visible only as an undifferentiated mass, or as injured suspects being apprehended by the more powerful authorities. An effort was made in the reporter’s voiceover narration to summarize the Chicano/a perspective on the event, but scenes of chaos overpower the attempt. Bureaucratic spokespersons, though, are given ample time to present their view of what happened. In the August 31 follow-up report, Chief Edward Davis of the Los Angeles Police Department made a startling claim worth quoting in full: Well I would say they’re definitely carrying out the orders of the Communist Party of the United States of America. . . . Uh, more than 10 months ago a decision was made uh, to, uh, more or less give up on the black people, other than the Black Panther activity, uh, they found that the black man wanted his fair share of America.

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And the efforts have been concentrated in the Mexican American areas, and, uh, with this riot you’d say with some success. The reporter fails to press Chief Davis for evidence. As in other reports on Chicano/a activism during this period, a white male authority is projected into living rooms as the voice of reason and order—no matter how absurd his claim—while Mexican Americans are associated with resentment and lawlessness. No attempt is made to research which side has more evidence for its assessment of what happened. Instead a hollow narrative of “one side said this while the other side said that” is laid on top of imagery that firmly reinforces the police interpretation of the day’s events. There were rare moments when television journalism’s contrast between saint and rebel seemed to bend a bit. In July 1970, NBC ran a unique two-part report on Mexican Americans. Set in San Antonio, the piece introduces viewers to Chicano/a politics with a montage of life in the barrio. As images of daily life in the west side flash across the screen, Mayor W. W. McAllister offers his opinion on the city’s Mexican American population: “Our citizens of Mexican descent are very fine people. They’re very fine people. They’re home loving. They love beauty. They love flowers. They love music. They love dancing. Perhaps they’re not quite as, uh, let’s say as ambitiously motivated as the Anglos are to get ahead financially, but they manage to get a lot out of life.”43 In the August 31 report on the Moratorium, Chief Davis’s ridiculous speculation about communist plots goes unquestioned. In this NBC report, a young Chicano named Mariano Aguilar gives his blunt assessment of Mayor McAllister’s paternalistic racism: “Racism. The whole attitude. The Anglo community, the gringo community as we call it here, they believe that anybody who is not white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is culturally and physically inferior, so what the hell. So we’ve been dealing with this for 200 years.”44 Aguilar, two of his friends, and reporter Jack Perkins are seen sitting at a table discussing the experiences of Mexican Americans in South Texas. Given the lack of firsthand Chicano perspectives in television journalism, it is remarkable that these young men appear on camera at all. Even more remarkable, though, is how the report is put together. In most coverage of this period, Chicano/as are filmed using a long shot or a medium-long shot, if they are recorded at all. The result is that the viewer is distanced from Mexican American subjects, and by extension from Mexican American politics. Here, though, the camera is positioned close to the three Chicanos and at

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figure 1.3. NBC News, July 6, 1970

eye level. The audience is invited to sit down with the young men while they share a beer and a cigarette and talk—without visible anger and with obvious insight—about their lives. Instead of screening Mexican American activism as deviance, NBC gives us a brief glimpse of the Chicano movement as a reasoned response to painful histories of racism in South Texas. But even this exceptional broadcast gravitates toward the reductive ideology that reduces Chicano/a activism to a national menace. Jack Perkins ended the first night’s report with a warning. He tells viewers that the San Antonio barrio is “a potentially explosive situation. There are those in San Antonio working to cool it, but there are also those plotting to make it explode.”45 In the next evening’s broadcast, Perkins reports at length on the danger that Chicano/a activism might pose to the American public. “Do they hate the gringo?” Perkins wonders. “If they do,” he continues, “why have the barrios—unlike the black ghettoes—never exploded?” Perkins has no answer to these questions, but he warns viewers that “there are today young firebrands growing in the barrios, secret men in hidden places who are plotting violence.” These “hot radicals,” as Perkins calls them, are now on the “fringes” of the Chicano movement, but he says that without rapid reform, even the moderates will decide that violence is the only answer. The tension between reform and revolution, incrementalism and militancy, is a constant in Chicano/a history, as in all social movements. The

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networks, though, were unable to mine the complexities and contradictions of this political tradition. Why were networks sympathetic to civil rights activism in the South during the 1950s and early 1960s, but indifferent to Chicano/a civil rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s? The answer to this question lies partly in the fact that during the years between Little Rock and the Chicano Moratorium, regulatory changes and increased competition caused television content to become more sensationalized. News producers were drawn to the story of black civil rights because of its captivating images and its gravitas.46 The situation had changed dramatically by the mid1960s. Television sets had become furniture in almost every American home, which meant that networks had to find new ways to stand out with their programming.47 Saturation coverage of the 1963 Kennedy assassination had convinced most people that television could serve as a chronicle of the nation’s history. ABC, which for a long time ran a distant third in the ratings chase, was becoming more competitive through sexier and more violent programming.48 Media executives were once willing to produce the evening news at a loss because they thought it strengthened the network’s “prestige,” but increasingly news divisions were being told to contribute to corporate’s bottom line. As a result, producers pursued stories with high-impact images and unambiguous “good-versus-evil” narratives.49 The developments inside the news industry dovetailed with broader shifts in U.S. politics and amplified the sense that things were coming apart. Richard Nixon was a master of the now-familiar conservative complaint that the liberal media was out to destroy him. In reality, the reframing of the civil rights movement that took place on television at the end of the 1960s helped the president exploit white anxiety.50 Coverage of civil rights activism in the 1950s bolstered the liberal argument that America was in the midst of an irreversible march toward freedom. What happened in the South was interpreted as the realization of the promise in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal.” Nixon turned this argument on its head by arguing that progressive movements were abusing the rights given to minorities in a democracy. No longer was the civil rights struggle part of an American tradition of dissent. Through television, it became a threat to the “silent majority,” Nixon’s famous phrase for the white, middle-class, straight families that were represented in popular media and by the political establishment as the real America. The president did not control the media, of course. In fact, journalists like Seymour Hersch were critical of Nixon. Print was

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bolder than television, though. Because Nixon appointed members of the Federal Communication Committee (FCC), and because the FCC controlled network licensing, the television industry showed more deference to the executive branch. The growing sensationalism of television news and drama fed the conscious and semi-conscious fears of the audience. This was the network contribution to Nixon’s message that progressive activism endangered America, and that only a tough hand like his could save it. By the end of the 1960s, the Chicano movement became one ingredient of many in the Nixonian paranoia that pervaded the dominant public sphere. This is evident in how reports on Chicano/a activism were contextualized in thirty-minute broadcasts. Take, for example, the April 1970 report of a “Mexican-American upheaval” in South Texas. Gregory Jackson’s segment followed a slate of stories that read like a Nixon speech—or perhaps one by Agnew—on the perils of liberalism. The show opened with reports on the steep decline in stock prices and on rising inflation. This was followed by an update on the war in Vietnam, including rumors of Communist troops at the Cambodian border, and then news about the nomination of Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court. The domestic news played to Nixon’s agenda. Howard K. Smith offered a report on the trial of H. Rap Brown on charges of inciting riot in Cambridge, Maryland, on July 24, 1967. Then came news of race riots in River Rouge, Michigan, antiwar demonstrations at the Pittsburgh Gulf Oil headquarters, and a segment on American youth returning from a trip to Cuba, where they volunteered for the revolution. With these reports as lead-in, Gregory Jackson’s report on “plans . . . to simply seize a vast tract of land” in Crystal City, Texas, seems to confirm Republican claims of a breakdown in law and order. The layout of broadcasts such as this one illuminate why white support for civil rights began to erode at the end of the 1960s. And it was not just whites that were influenced by this framing. A sizable number of moderate and conservative Mexican Americans accepted the network’s positioning of the Chicano movement—and left politics more broadly— as a danger. Texas Representative Henry Gonzales won support from Anglos and from conservative Mexican Americans by contrasting his pro-Americanism with what he described as the anti-Americanism of young Chicano/a militants. A similar dynamic emerged in East Los Angeles in the early 1970s, when efforts to incorporate the barrio were defeated by opponents who scared residents into thinking that radicals would take over new city government.51 The strategy was successful

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because it relied on the paranoid perspective that circulated every evening on the network news. Why did so many viewers trust television’s one-dimensional rendering of the Chicano movement? Why especially would Mexican Americans trust the corporate news, when they had children and friends in the movement? The answer lies in the reassurance that television offers, for if the news draws viewer attention by playing on their fears, it wins their trust and affection by offering comfort from a seemingly chaotic world. This dynamic manifests itself clearly in coverage of the Chicano Moratorium. In the NBC broadcast, unsettling images of dangerous minorities were counterbalanced by an implicit promise that the “thin blue line” of police officers seen on the screen would restore order. The evening news performed a vital function in the turbulent world of postwar America by giving viewers nightly reassurances of the power of governing bodies. In a time of tremendous changes to the state and to the global flow of capital, images of the police quelling riots offered viewers confidence in governing institutions. This confidence was buttressed not only by the scenes of police restoring order and by on-camera interviews with experts, but also by the structure of the commercial television system. By the end of the 1960s, most viewers organized their routines around their favorite shows. The programming grid represented more than mere entertainment. Its predictability made it a bulwark against the seeming chaos of the world outside the home. Commercials are easily overlooked in news archives because they make no explicit claim to authority, but they played a key role in making network coverage of the Chicano movement and of left activism seem credible, even when there were clear inconsistencies. Every commercial offers two things. It offers a commodity, but, more than that, it offers the pleasures of possession. John Berger says the following about advertising, or what he calls publicity: Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. . . . One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her [the viewer’s] love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of a product.52 There is something profoundly strange in watching an up-tempo commercial for Lanicane (“For itching problems anywhere, except your eyes”) used as a lead-in for footage of rioting in Los Angeles, as NBC had

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done with its coverage of the Chicano Moratorium. Viewers, though, rarely notice this strangeness because they have been trained to make careful distinctions between the unruliness of the street and the safety of the domestic sphere and its consumer logic. Elites benefit from this acculturation, because it leads many people to believe the solution to every problem lies in the marketplace, and not in the political sphere. It creates a trust in corporations and in the system that gave rise to them. And it creates distrust toward any movement that calls this system into question. Digital technologies have dramatically changed the network news and the television industry, but expanding corporate control of these technologies has left largely unquestioned the basic relationship between media, citizenship, and government. For complex institutional and political reasons, the network news during the 1960s and 1970s proved unable to give its viewers meaningful coverage of the Chicano movement. There were rare exceptions, such as Jack Perkins’s on-camera interview with Mariano Aguilar. The exceptions, though, only serve to prove the powerful rule: the networks generally presented an ideological image of Chicano/a politics as a dangerous departure from the normal workings of society. How would the story of the Chicano movement have changed with better coverage? Would activists have received more public support? Would the Chicano movement look different now? These are impossible questions, for while the networks did cover the UFW strike, they ignored many of the events that defined the Chicano movement: the 1966 protest against President Johnson’s foot dragging on Chicano/a concerns; the massive 1968 school walkouts in Los Angeles; the 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver; and even the 1972 national convention of the La Raza Unida Party in El Paso. Only NBC gave coverage to this important moment in the history of American third-party politics. The decades after World War II are remembered as the golden age of American news, a time when TV journalism was more than the alarmist headlines, shallow reporting, knee-jerk punditry, and tabloid features that dominate today’s news. This nostalgic narrative is an appealing refuge, but the archive of network coverage of Mexican American politics suggests a different narrative. There were rare moments of insight and courage, just as today there are examples of independent and informed reporting. But in considering coverage of the Chicano movement during the postwar decades, it is hard to ignore the lack of substance and the frequent inability to get around demeaning stereotypes. The networks proved largely incapable of interpreting the

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importance of Chicano/a activism to Mexican Americans and to the nation as a whole. The impact of this exclusion has been considerable. Thin coverage by the networks made it difficult for movement activists to win public support at the local and the national level. For example, the media’s dismissive posture toward Alianza claims of discrimination and theft made it impossible to have a serious discussion of the chronic environmental, economic, and political problems that continue to plague Hispanos in New Mexico. Moreover, because television news became author of the “first draft” of American history, its poor handling of Mexican American activism forced the Chicano movement to the very margins of U.S. history. Given the power that television journalism has had in shaping our perception of the 1960s in particular, it is not surprising that many members of the American public have only a faint knowledge of the career of César Chávez, if they have any knowledge of the Chicano movement at all. Blogs, social networking, podcasts, and other forms of new media have ended the network monopoly on how news is made and disseminated. They have made corporate media more accountable to fact checking, and they also allow for a greater range of voices in public debate. The Internet is not a silver bullet, though. The development of online media does not guarantee an informed public, let alone bring about social justice. Media politics must be incorporated into a larger strategy for creating progressive change. Although the journalistic landscape looks very different now than it did during the postwar period, the Chicano movement offers inspiration and a model for doing just this. Chicano/a activists of the 1960s and 1970s recognized the limitations of mainstream corporate media, and so they developed an independent media that became the foundation for grassroots coalitions and for a vibrant cultural politics. The media movement they started remains today an important dimension of progressive Chicano/a politics.

The Making of a Chicano/a Media It is impossible to give a complete history of media coverage of the Chicano movement in one chapter. The archival gaps that need filling in would require a book of their own. Also, the footage that was preserved is varied. There were consistent patterns in how the national networks covered the movement, but there is much that still needs to be said about how the footage was assembled, how viewers received it, and how it

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compared to local television and print coverage. A more detailed study of these topics deserves to be written. Television’s narrow representation of Chicanos/as was echoed in various cultural domains, including print media, the museum industry, theater, radio, and film. From the perspective of cultural elites, Chicanos/as were in America but not quite of America. But no matter what is said about network coverage of Mexican American issues, to ignore the sophisticated responses by Chicano/a activists is to marginalize the Chicano movement all over again. Mexican Americans did not sit in their living rooms and allow the reductive images on the nightly news to go uncontested. Informed and inspired by a decades-long heritage of Mexican American media activism, and by the cultural commentary of Max Horkheimer, C. Wright Mills, and other leftists, Mexican Americans created an independent Chicano/a press. They made use of radio, TV, and film, but print was their focus because the barriers to entry were relatively low, and distribution was relatively inexpensive. The Chicano/a press was among the most influential cultural tools of the Chicano movement. It allowed activists to produce counterimages and counternarratives of what it meant to be Mexican in the United States. It allowed for the development of the different nationalisms that bridged class, regional, and racial divides within Chicano/a communities. And it gave Mexican Americans the opportunity to become cultural producers in a society that increasingly encouraged passive cultural consumption. This latter achievement was especially important because the Chicano/a press served as wellspring for an expressive tradition that continues today. The young people who formed the nucleus of the Chicano movement were part of the famous baby boom that followed World War II, a time when American society was reorganizing itself around new patterns of family life and consumption.53 Coming of age during the media expansion of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, this generational cohort had access to unprecedented film, television, and radio content. Aniko Bodroghkozy argues that baby boomers responded to the proliferation of mass media—and to television in particular—with mixed emotion. Many immersed themselves in the new medium, turning it on before school, after school, and on weekends to watch Dragnet, Gunsmoke, The Howdy Doody Show, The Flintstones, Lassie, and all their favorite shows. The attachment of these youth to television seemed to confirm widespread fears among pundits that the “vast wasteland”54 of TV programming would be the intellectual and moral

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ruin of the nation. Commentators, though, were not always attentive to the complex responses people had to television. Some viewers were uncritical consumers of network fare, but there were significant numbers who became savvy media observers. Bodroghkozy says that many in the postwar generation came up with oppositional readings of the dominant messages being transmitted over the airwaves. They challenged the empty-headed consumerism they found on the “boob tube,” and they looked for alternatives to the media’s embrace of Cold War militarism. As they entered their high school and college years, many even turned off the set entirely.55 Historian Vicki Ruiz says that in the early twentieth century, young Mexican American women found in popular culture a way of navigating “the contradictions in their lives—the lure of Hollywood and the threat of deportation.” She writes that “the experiences of Mexican American women coming of age between 1920 and 1950 reveal the blending of the old and the new: fashioning new expectations, making choices, and learning to live with these choices.”56 Regrettably there is very little information on the television habits of Chicanos/as in the 1950s and 1960s, but anecdotal evidence makes clear that television was as much a part of the lives of Mexican American youth as it was for whites. These two audiences did not, however, have identical reactions to what they watched. Like their Anglo peers, Mexican Americans had deep affection for the characters and stories they saw on the small screen as young children. As they got older, they, too, were sometimes critical of the runaway consumerism of the medium. Yet Chicanos/as were also attuned to the ways in which television excluded Mexican Americans or depicted them in crude and damaging stereotypes. The feelings of anger, frustration, and even sadness that went along with this awareness helped fuel the activism of the postwar years. A. Arzate’s remarkable poem “THE CISCO KID RIDES AGAIN (i.e. the movement doesn’t like my heroes)” gives expression to the ambivalent feeling many Chicanos/as had toward television and mass media. Published in 1969 by Con Safos, a prominent serial from Los Angeles, this one-hundred-line poem comments on a radio show from the 1940s that became a popular television show in the 1950s. Arzate (a pseudonym) turns his memory of The Cisco Kid into a complex and original analysis of the subjective ambiguities inherent in the relationship between Chicanos/as and popular culture. Addressing an implied audience of peers who demand that he renounce his boyhood idol for the sake of the movement, the Chicano speaker of the poem refuses, saying:

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And suddenly I’m supposed to turn against the Cisco Kid? because he was vendido? [a sellout] and represented the gabacho establecimiento? [white establishment] chale ese! [to hell with that] that’s like flipping La Virgen a bone, and there’s hardly no one gonna do that kind of thing; you know, I really liked the Cisco Kid.57 The achievement of Arzate’s poem—to my mind one of the most original of the era—lies in its careful use of humor to understand the feelings of pleasure and possibility, self-hatred and betrayal that mass media, and especially television, prompted. The speaker of the poem, now grown up, knows all too well that “loyal Pancho,” the dimwitted sidekick of the cowboy known as the Cisco Kid, is premised wholly on racial stereotypes about Mexican stupidity and servility. The speaker also realizes that there is something queer about the fantasy world of heroes and sidekicks: “’cause I liked Pancho too, / though I always wondered what he did / while he was peeping in at Cisco making love.”58 Ultimately, though, the unnamed speaker “cannot crush the part of me that is / a boy / and live / contento [content].”59 Many commentators understand queer politics as a dimension of Chicano/a politics that emerged only in the 1980s, after the rumored collapse of the Chicano movement. Gay and lesbian activism was more visible during this decade and in the decades since, but Arzate’s poem shows the presence of these issues at the height of the Chicano movement, and in a magazine that was central to the development of nationalism. The personal and political contradictions explored in Arzate’s poem sparked the creation of a Chicano/a media during the 1960s and 1970s. The postwar period was not the first time that Mexican populations in the United States were alienated by the mainstream media, nor was it the first time they responded by creating a media of their own. In the years leading up to and during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), the New Orleans Picayune and other major U.S. newspapers fostered public support for a war of aggression by circulating representations of Mexicans as lazy, feudal, lustful, and dirty. Robert W. Johannsen puts it this way: “The essential link between [the Mexican War] and the people was provided by the nation’s press, for it was through the ubiquitous American newspaper that the war achieved its vitality in the popular mind.”60

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These image of Mexicanness presented in the penny presses was echoed in popular prose, including in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and George Wilkins Kendall’s Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition (1844). Spanish-speaking populations throughout the Mexican territories realized that the press was being used as a weapon of war. Prohibited from participating in the dominant public sphere, they began to produce their own media. Kirsten Silva Gruesz notes that publications like San Antonio’s El Bejareño and El Clamor Público in Los Angeles allowed the conquered mexicano populations of the Southwest to strengthen communal bonds and to answer racist stereotypes. She argues that these titles were part of a larger push among the Spanish-speaking in the United States to “mark English as the ‘foreign’ tongue” and thus to imagine “an implicit, incipient Americanist consciousness.”61 In the 1890s, attempts were made to establish a regional news network. There was even an ambitious effort in the 1890s to build a journalistic network capable of increasing circulation and furthering unity among Latinos/as. According to Robert Rosenbaum, representatives of seven papers met at Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1892 and formed La Prensa Asociada Hispano-Americana; its goal was to unite Spanish American “periodicals, writers and poets across the United States into an association designed to preserve the heritage and protect the rights of all Hispanic peoples in the country.”62 The organization lasted only a short time, but it became an important precedent for the Chicano Press Association (CPA), a national coalition formed in 1969 and comprised of twenty-two movement publications. According to its mission statement, the CPA was committed to “the liberation of the Chicano and other oppressed people. . . . The CPA supports the struggle against exploitation and all forms of oppression with the goal of building a new society in which human dignity, justice and brotherhood will prevail.”63 Though they used the rhetoric of innovation, movement publishers knew and respected the Chicano/a history of media activism. Francisca Flores, founder of the feminist organization Comisión Femenil Mexicana (Mexican Women’s Commision), named her influential publication Regeneración after the visionary serial put out by Ricardo Flores Magón and the Partido Liberal Mexicano.64 Media activism continued in the early twentieth century as Mexican Americans organized against racism in the film industry. They were concerned about practices both in front of the camera and behind it. Los Angeles was home to a large Mexican population at the turn of the century, many of them refugees from the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. An

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energetic theater scene had emerged at places like the Teatro California and the Teatro Hidalgo, with talent such as Virginia Fábregas, the Salvadoran Gustavo Solano, Luis Mendoza López, and the Niño Fidencio Company.65 Hollywood ignored this talent, though. Mexican Americans and other Latinos/as found little work in the studio system, except as bandits or as Indians.66 Movies had a dramatic impact on all of American theater, but its impact on Spanish-language theater was especially severe. Nicolás Kanellos says Hispanic theater “was not snuffed out all at once.” It “dimmed,” sending many actors out of the business, to regional theater, or to New York, “where Spanish-language vaudeville survived until the early 1960s.”67 Mexican American media activists were concerned about film’s impact on their cultural heritage and on off-camera hiring practices. They were also concerned about Hollywood’s on-camera stereotypes, especially in the influential Westerns.68 On June 24, 1930, a large, multiethnic group of communist activists assembled in front of the Regun Theatre in Harlem to denounce the new Warner Brothers film Under a Texas Moon, which told the story of a light-skinned caballero (gentleman) named Don Carlos, played by comedian Frank Fay. Don Carlos chased down cattle rustlers and rescued the señorita Lorita Romero—described by a New York Times reviewer as a “dark-eyed wench”—from her domineering father.69 Five “Latin-Americans” (as the New York Times called them) ranging in age from twenty-two to forty were arrested that night after the crowd allegedly “tried to storm the theatre.”70 A few days later, on June 27, a “Negro” named Alfred Luro walked into a Harlem police station saying he had been struck in the head by an officer at a rally in support of the five detainees. Luro died the next day of what officials vaguely described as “apoplexy.”71 The story was not over. On June 30, a Mexican organizer named Gonzálo Gonzáles was killed at a memorial rally for Luro by a police officer who later claimed he was attacked by participants after asking the mourners to see a parade permit.72 Two people were now dead in the wake of the protest at the Under a Texas Moon premiere. On July 1, approximately two thousand attendees came to pay their last respects to Luro, and on July 4 an estimated 2,500 “radicals” gathered for Gonzáles’s funeral.73 In a statement to the press, Communist leaders drew an explicit and militant connection between the recent police brutality and the film, saying: “The Communist party further charges that Comrade Gonzales was shot to death by Policeman O’Brien while he, with a number of Latin-American workers, was marching to view the

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body of the Negro worker, Alfred Luro, and to protest the arrest of five Latin-American workers who demonstrated against race discrimination and Yankee imperialist slander against Latin-American workers.”74 The killings of Luro and Gonzales mark an exceptional moment in the history of black and Latino/a participation in the Popular Front. It reflected, though, a common sentiment among racial minorities about Hollywood. Such events were largely ignored by the mainstream media, but they influenced later generations of Chicano/a activists. Anger at the killing of Gonzálo Gonzáles ignited the political career of Luisa Moreno, one of the most important Latina activists of the twentieth century.75 Moreno was at the Regun Theater on June 24, and afterward she decided to organize on behalf of Spanish-speaking workers. She founded the pioneering grassroots organization El Congreso de los Pueblos de Habla Español (Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples). The Guatemalan-born Moreno was deported from the United States in 1950 amid anticommunist assaults on the Left. Fortunately, Bert Corona and other activists who knew her bridged the gap that McCarthyism had created between prewar and postwar progressive politics. In Chicano/a studies classrooms and in informal “rap sessions” in coffee shops, bars, and living rooms, movement activists studied the Mexican American tradition of media critique. They used this legacy as inspiration for their own efforts to transform the public perception of Chicanos/as at a time when mass media was becoming a central part of the political system. Because of its prominence in postwar America, television was a focal point of Chicano/a media activism. Exclusive training and expensive equipment made it hard to break into the television industry, but the 1960s and 1970s witnessed new opportunities for Chicano/a participation in television production. The opening was created in part by macro political changes in the media environment. President Lyndon Johnson had pushed for the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 because he wanted to mollify liberal critics of the war in Vietnam. Public television had strong viewership in its early years, as television was becoming more sensational and many viewers wanted an alternative to what they saw as excessive violence and sexuality on the commercial networks.76 Activism by the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and short-lived groups such as the Midwest Chicano Mass Media Committee ensured that these industry dynamics translated into meaningful opportunities for Mexican American cultural producers. As Chon Noriega argues, these “social protest groups engaged the FCC, the U.S. Court of Appeals, advertisers,

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and the television industry, and they bookend a decade of professional efforts to create a programming space for Chicano-produced material that could address a dual audience: the Chicano community and the nation.” The commercial networks were largely unresponsive to this pressure, but it allowed Chicanos/as greater access to public television. There were several Chicano/a and Latino/a filmmakers who took advantage of these new opportunities. Jesús Salvador Treviño, the unofficial documentarian of the Chicano movement, wrote and produced several documentaries, including Soledad (1971), Yo soy Chicano (1972), and America Tropical (1972). Between 1972 and 1974, he headed the public-affairs program Acción Chicano (1972–1974) on KCET in Los Angeles, and in 1977 he wrote and directed the feature-length Raices de sangre, a bilingual film set in Socorro, Texas (but filmed in Mexico), about an effort by labor activists to build a cross-border labor union. Treviño was one of the few who transitioned to a career in commercial television. In 2000, he signed on as a director and producer for the Showtime series Resurrection Blvd (2000–2002). Feminist filmmaker Sylvia Morales began her career on the public-affairs program called Unidos. Morales produced the groundbreaking documentary Chicana (1979), and she later contributed to PBS’s Chicano!: The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (1996), still the only full-scale documentary treatment of the Chicano movement. Humberto Cintrón served as executive producer of the New York–based WNET series Realidades (1972–1975), which helped forge institutional and political bonds between Puerto Ricans and Chicanos/as. Moctesuma Esparza produced Requiem-29 (1972), a moving documentary about the killing of Rubén Salazar, and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982), a film based on the influential Texas corrido. More recently Esparza produced Walkout (2006), an HBO film that dramatized the 1968 school protests in Los Angeles.77 Esparza is one of the few Chicano/a filmmakers to enjoy sustained success on the silver screen. Among other projects, he was a producer on The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) and Selena (1997), two films that made imaginative efforts to translate movement ideals into the narrow conventions of Hollywood. Hollywood, though, has generally remained closed to Chicano/a artists. The visibility of a few celebrities—among them Salma Hayak, Jennifer Lopez, Selena Gomez, and George Lopez— gives the impression that the film industry has become more inclusive. Latino/as have found success at the edges of Hollywood, but because of the decline of public television, television, and film have become less inclusive than they were in the 1970s.78 Filmmakers have had to turn to

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alternative media networks. Aniko Bodroghkyz says a wave of guerilla video followed the 1968 introduction of the Sony Portapak, as video recording meant a real alternative to expensive 35mm film and to the racism of the Hollywood studios.79 Mexican Americans were a part of this video insurgency. Especially noteworthy are the works of Chicana feminists like Sylvia Morales, Esperanza Vásquez, and the enduring Lourdes Portillo, women who, as Rosa Linda Fregoso argues, found in video the freedom and flexibility to challenge both the studio system and the often male-dominated world of Chicano film.80 In his autobiography Eyewitness: A Filmmaker’s Memoir of the Chicano Movement, Jesús Treviño tells a story that symbolizes Chicano/a efforts to infiltrate television and film during the 1960s and 1970s. The episode took place in September 1968 while Treviño was a film student at the New Communicators School, a federally funded affirmative action program that trained Chicano/a activists alongside black activists from the Sons of Watts and other militant groups. Treviño wanted to get footage of a sit-in being held at the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters in protest of teacher Sal Castro’s suspension for his participation in the student walkouts. Lacking the proper equipment for an outdoor scene, he situated his Konika Super 8 video camera next to a local TV news crew so he could borrow their light for the documentary he was producing.81 Treviño’s improvisation is representative of creativity and commitment that informed film and video production of the 1960s and 1970s. It illustrates also the range of strategies that Mexican Americans employed in their efforts to influence media culture in the United States: they continued the boycott tradition by boycotting films like Walk Proud (1979) that exploited demeaning stereotypes; they petitioned the FCC to revoke the license of KVOU-AM in Texas for its unresponsiveness to local Mexican American audiences; they spoke directly with media elites about obstacles to participation; they organized grassroots conferences across the country to train individuals on how to be critical media consumers and on how to become content producers; and they organized boycotts of advertisers and programs who deployed racist stereotypes for profit.82 Occasionally these campaigns got the attention of the public. In July 1970, Domingo Reyes appeared before Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee hearing on racism in television. He declared that the marketing campaigns of companies like Frito-Lay had created “a new nigger, only his name is Pancho, Pepe, or Speedy Gonzales.”83 CBS News made Reyes’s provocative testimony the subject of a July 30, 1970, report.

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Film, television, and radio were each important tools in the making of a Chicano/a media during the 1960s and 1970s. César Chávez had wanted to establish a radio station that would entertain farmworkers and inform them about medical, legal, and employment issues. Radio Campesina went on the air in 1983 and is among the last successful initiatives of the UFW movement. In 1965, Reies López Tijerina launched a daily fifteen-minute radio program about Alianza issues on KABQ in Albuquerque. However, the most influential communication tool in the Chicano/a media was the press, for while the postwar decades witnessed some of the most revolutionary changes in media technology in human history—including the start of satellite broadcasting and the creation of ARPANET, the military project that formed the basis of the Internet—they also saw a renaissance of the printed word, especially in leftist movements around the globe. Much has been written about the “underground” press that exploded during the 1960s in Berkeley (The Barb), Chicago (Seed), New York (East Village Other), and Los Angeles (Free Press), as well as internationally in Paris, London, and Mexico City.84 A print renaissance also took place in the Chicano movement through the emergence of the Chicano/a press, a collection or assemblage of independent newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, journals, chapbooks, and manifestos that circulated formally and informally in movement circles. Because of its accessibility and its dynamics, the Chicano/a press was in many ways the cornerstone of the cultural politics of the Chicano movement. All the titles in the Chicano/a press were committed to defending cultural rights and securing economic justice, but they were diverse in their format, constituency, and political outlook. Most common were the student-oriented newspapers, magazines, and chapbooks produced on college campuses, including the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Wisconsin-Appleton, Harvard, and San Joaquin Delta College. Most Chicanos/as were deeply skeptical of the U.S. educational system. Historically, Mexican Americans were identified as a problem population that needed to be “cured” of the influence of their home. They were tracked toward low-paying vocations and dropped out far more than their white peers. Colleges and universities did not service Chicano/a communities, either, even in areas with large Mexican American populations. During the 1930s and 1940s, researchers would sometimes produce what were described as objective reports on barrio pathologies. But higher education was otherwise largely indifferent to Chicanos/as.

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As it had done for many African Americans and for the poor of all races, the “Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944” (or the G.I. Bill, as it was popularly called) cracked open the doors of higher education for many Mexican Americans. Students used this opportunity—and the support of white liberals—to establish vibrant print cultures on and around their campuses. Often they used the homes of faculty allies, department-owned mimeograph machines, the fraternity or sorority house, and the student building as intellectual theaters and as presses. These spaces were vital because they allowed students to discover the power of the written word. In and through print, young people were able to formulate the cultural nationalist ideologies that drew students to MEChA and United Mexican American Students, and to the Chicano movement as a whole. Students were able to use the pen to develop their thinking on the war in Vietnam, the policies of school administrators who served in loco parentis, the underfunding of antipoverty programs, the denial of women’s reproductive rights, and other controversial issues. The student publications of the Chicano/a press became vital organs of the Chicano movement. They helped bridge the gap that had grown up between the community and the university, often by encouraging service learning and cultural inquiry. For example, students in one Chicana studies classroom in Southern California were asked to do oral histories of women leaders in the community and to publish them in the campus-based Chicano/a periodical. The resulting special edition of the journal El Popo at Cal State University Northridge—home to the first Mexican American studies program in the country—helped create support on campus for feminist activism and scholarship.85 The Chicano/a media activism on college campuses and occasionally at high schools demonstrated the importance of academic work to progressive politics, especially now in a neoliberal age when universities are trying to imitate corporations and focusing on developing students who will act as middle managers of capital, or who will create new technologies without inquiring about their applications. Other publications that were part of the Chicano/a press were produced by specific movimiento groups. The Denver-based organization Crusade for Justice focused mainly on urban issues such as police brutality, poverty, and housing discrimination. It developed its fiery brand of Chicano/a nationalism in the pages of El Gallo, a newspaper that was published weekly between July 1968 and the spring of 1980. El Gallo was among the more polished productions of the Chicano/a press. The editors ran news and commentary from a Chicano/a perspective. They

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also published amateur poetry, prose, and illustrations submitted by readers. El Malcriado—one of the founding members of the Chicano/a press—first came out in 1964 as the official publication of what at the time was called the National Farm Worker’s Association. Like César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and most members of the farmworker movement, El Malcriado was less nationalistic in its orientation than many other Chicano/a organizations.86 But it expressed solidarity with other Chicano/a initiatives, including the Alianza and the Chicano Moratorium. El Malcriado published news about the strike, editorials about state politics, advice for farmworkers on how to stretch their dollars, stories about the national labor movement, and even a popular comic strip featuring the iconic Don Sotaco. The paper was initially written in Spanish and aimed exclusively at farmworkers, but El Malcriado began publishing bilingual editions and expanded its audience dramatically as the fight against the grape growers became a national news item. At its peak, El Malcriado had eighteen thousand subscribers. There was even a German-language edition called Der Campesino that circulated in Berlin during the mid-1970s.87 The translation reflected the historic bonds between Germans and Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where los alemanes (Germans) settled in the nineteenth century to work in the mines and in the fields. Evidence of these bonds can be heard in the polka-influenced accordion of Mexican norteño music. Der Campesino folded quickly, but German universities remained an important location for work in Chicano/a studies during the 1980s and into the twenty-first century. Still other Chicano/a press publications were produced inside of the U.S. penitentiary system. These pinto (inmate) periodicals were created against the backdrop of a massive expansion of the American criminal justice system. The U.S. prison population was growing rapidly as a result of stricter sentencing guidelines for all offenses, but especially for drug offenses. Between 1970 and 1980, the incarceration rate rose from 97 per 100,000 U.S. residents, a near-historic low, to 140 per 100,000 U.S. residents, then a historic high).88 Between 1980 and 2008, that number soared from 140 to 714, far higher than any other nation in the world.89 The serial Aztlán (not to be confused with the academic journal of the same name) was produced by inmates at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. It represented an effort to challenge mainstream media’s dehumanization of inmates, to show how prison policies reflected larger social and political injustices, and to create solidarity among prisoners. Pinto periodicals like Aztlán tended to be more strident in their tone and more radical

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than the campus-based and community-based periodicals. They frequently articulated a defiantly orthodox Marxism, and sometimes even an anarchist critique of “gabacho” imperialism. Moreover, they generally framed problems of crime and punishment through a cross-racial lens. Alan Eladio Gómez argues that Aztlán was unique in how it combined the ideas of Frantz Fanon, Mao, Paulo Friere, and other leftist figures to create coalitions. Produced in cooperation with Puerto Rican independistas imprisoned at Leavenworth, the newspaper showed that Chicano/a nationalisms often intersected with and drew inspiration from other cultural nationalisms.90 Noted writers like Raúl Salinas, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Ricardo Sanchez found their artistic and political voice in jail and have become advocates for progressive reform. The Chicano/a press adopted a “rasquache” aesthetic that was premised on making creative use of limited resources.91 Some Chicano/a publications had a modest subscription base and included advertising from local “Raza-friendly” businesses. La Raza in Los Angeles and El Grito del Norte in New Mexico were able to pay for professional offset printing and had better production values than most publications. A few even were published by corporate publishers. Armando Rendón’s ultranationalist Chicano Manifesto, for example, was released in 1972 by Macmillan. Strangely enough, this text could be seen on the shelves of Borders and other book chains until 2001 or 2002, long after most radical texts of the 1960s and 1970s had been relegated to the dustbin of history. Texts like Rendón’s were an exception, though. Most publications were given away free of charge, which meant that publishers had to rely on some combination of donations, small grants, trades, and volunteerism. By necessity these publications were produced on a shoestring budget. Their production value was low, and they were often run in limited editions using accessible communication technologies such as the mimeograph machine, the underappreciated workhorse of progressive activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chicano/a serials were circulated along informal networks, handed off from one friend to another, distributed at rallies, school buildings, and public plazas, and given out at organizational meetings. These networks are all but impossible to map retrospectively, but they were crucial instruments in the Chicano movement because they created a language for Chicano/a activism and cemented the affective bonds that make social movements possible. The most obvious function of the Chicano/a press was to develop a Chicano/a perspective. The network news usually ignored Mexican American politics, and when it did cover Chicano/a issues, it distorted

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them with a conservative “law-and-order” ideology. Print was better, but not by much. To its great credit, the Los Angeles Times had given the pioneering journalist Rubén Salazar the institutional freedom to develop a “Chicano beat” in Southern California. He used this freedom to write some of the Chicano movement’s most honest and most original prose until his career was cut short on August 29, 1970. Most newspapers, though, ignored the Chicano movement, or they repeated the wire service’s obsession with stories of violence and public disorder. As a result, Chicano/a activists—some of whom had grown up hearing stories of how William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express and Los Angeles Examiner had stoked the fires of the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943 with their racist and highly sensationalized coverage—neither trusted the traditional news media nor sought to imitate its often naïve idealization of “objective” reporting. In fact, Chicano/a publications of the 1960s and 1970s more closely resembled the so-called “amateur press” of the nineteenth century, with its populist political sensibilities, its rabblerousing tone, and its frequent polemics.92 To outsiders, the Chicano/a press may have seemed naïve. For movement activists, though, it represented a direct challenge to mainstream media’s fictional “objectivity” in its handling of race in America. In addition to providing information from Chicano/a perspectives, the Chicano/a press helped forge the idea of a Chicano/a nation. Benedict Anderson explains that the emergence of newspapers during the early modern era helped generate a feeling of nationness among readers who, while sitting down at the breakfast table or anywhere else to read the day’s headlines, could imagine themselves as part of one people.93 This national feeling continues to undergird the nation-state today, although of course it is no longer nourished so much by the printed newspaper as it is by television and online journalism. Chicana critic Maylei Blackwell explains that this national feeling can also anchor subnational communities that define themselves in opposition to the state, which is precisely what happened during the 1960s and 1970s as Mexican Americans increasingly came to believe they were part of a nation within a nation, or what was described by some Chicano/a intellectuals as an “internal colony.” The Chicano/a press was pivotal in producing what Blackwell calls the “Chicano nationalist imaginary” since it set into circulation a catalogue of rhetoric and imagery that gave form to an embryonic sense of shared identity. Feminist and queer-identified commentators Norma Alarcón, Cherríe Moraga, Richard T. Rodríguez, and Blackwell herself have noted

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that dominant versions of Chicano/a nationalism precluded those who did not and could not conform to its imitative vision of a nation built on male-headed, straight familias.94 Nevertheless, Chicano/a nationalism in its varied guises generated or inspired a hitherto unprecedented level of political mobilizing among Mexican Americans by utilizing the traditional framework of the nation in order to cement a nontraditional political agenda. Feminists and gays and lesbians sometimes forged their own egalitarian versions of nationalism. These dynamics set in motion a progressive movement that continues to evolve and expand. The Chicano/a press also provided spaces—both physical and intellectual—in which Mexican Americans could go from being cultural consumers to cultural producers. This function of the press may be the least obvious, but it is among the most important. The consolidation of corporate television in the 1960s and 1970s happened against the backdrop of protracted struggles over mass media technologies. With the development of wireless radio technologies at the end of the nineteenth century, humans could for the first time in history reach a single mass audience at a single moment. During the early twentieth century, the nature and purpose of these powerful technologies was up for genuine debate. There were those who argued that the airwaves should be set aside as a public utility. They envisioned radio and later television as two-directional media tools that would allow for public dialogue and creative expression. Others saw an opportunity for commerce on an unprecedented scale: if the scarce radio bandwidth was privately owned, it could be rented out and used to stimulate consumer demand through mass advertising. The Radio Act of 1927 tried to have it both ways by establishing the airwaves as a government-owned resource dedicated to “public interest, convenience, and necessity,” only to then license out radio frequencies to private interests. Still public in name, the airwaves almost immediately became dominated by the financial interests of large corporations. Pressure by educators, religious leaders, and community activists helped preserve a “public interest standard” for broadcast media, but increasingly the potential of radio and television to allow for civic dialogue was eclipsed by a model in which elites transmitted news and entertainment one-directionally. The enormous profitability of radio and television drove the expansion of the culture industry to new heights, so that media became more deeply embedded in everyday life than at any other point in recorded history. The need for specialization and the high costs of production kept most people from making media, though.

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The top-down media system that solidified after World War II left many Chicanos/as eager for alternatives. They were not alone. The narrow social and ideological spectrum that governed the mass media system filtered out a whole range of communities and perspectives. But for many Mexican Americans, the desire for public expression was particularly acute. From an early age, Mexican Americans were given subtle and not-so-subtle messages that their cultures, their histories, and even their language was somehow outside of and inferior to the traditions that defined America. In school, Chicanos/as encountered a segregated educational system that failed to provide them with meaningful intellectual opportunities. For example, Dolores Huerta, who would later in life become renowned for her sharp mind and her oratory, was devastated by a high school teacher who accused her of plagiarism because he doubted that a Mexican girl could write well.95 Those young people who did manage to excel in academics often did so at the expense of their communal bonds. Their success often alienated them from their families and their neighborhoods—first emotionally as they experienced the loneliness of being a “scholarship kid,” and then physically as they were bused to wealthier areas or moved to college. These feelings of alienation fueled the Chicano movement, and they frequently show up in Chicano/a literature of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. El Teatro Campesino’s play No saco nada de la escuela (1969), Richard Vasquez’s novel Chicano (1972), and Berta Ornelas’s little-read feminist novel Come Down from the Mound (1975) all thematize the frustration that Mexican Americans felt at poor schooling and discriminatory media. Yet no text better captures the complex and often painful isolation of Mexican Americans from institutions of public discourse in the United States than José Antonio Villareal’s bildungsroman novel Pocho, first published in 1959 and sometimes read as a founding document of the Chicano movement. The novel’s protagonist, the iconic Richard Rubio, is a brilliant and passionate young man who devours books and who (in the tradition of Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus) imagines himself a writer taking on the world. Rubio feels more of a kinship with Friedrich Nietzsche than with the Virgen de Guadalupe, but the persistence of teachers and administrators in seeing him as an ineducable “Mexican” drives him away from learning, from his family, and even from himself. In the novel’s dénouement, Rubio’s enlists in the U.S. Navy because he wants to be part of America. Only after being sworn in and boarding a train for boot camp does he realize amid “the chatter of his new companions” that although the military has given him a public life, it comes

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at the cost of a private death.96 Rubio realizes at the close of the novel that “for him there would never be a coming back.” He will die in battle, or he will be stripped of the communal ties that helped him become who he was in the first place.97 To individuals who had been discouraged from intellectual work and from creative labor, the Chicano/a press was a transformative experience. The quality of the material that these individuals produced was uneven. Some of the visual art and poetry was sentimental and hurried, useful mainly to the person who created it. But some of the work was truly great, rivaling anything that was seen in mainstream publications. Adelante Raza!, a small publication from Appleton, Wisconsin, ran amateur images of local Chicanos/as engaged in everyday pursuits. They are images that often evoke the style of Dorothea Lange in their sincerity and surprise. Oscar Zeta Acosta was a frequent contributor to the journal Con Safos, where he published short prose pieces such as “Love Letter to the Girls of Aztlán” that are as remarkable for their subtle irony and lyricism as they are for their unsubtle misogyny. Enriqueta Vasquez, a widely respected feminist activist in New Mexico, published a regular column in New Mexico’s El Grito del Norte called “¡Despierten Hermanos!” (Wake up, brothers and sisters!) that was as fresh and as insightful as writing by Ellen Goodman or other celebrated commentators.98 Yet to judge the Chicano/a press solely on the quality of what you see on the page is to miss the highest significance of the Chicano/a press, which is what it made possible off the page. Only a small handful of those who participated in the Chicano/a press went on to have careers in the arts or letters, but everyone who sat down to write a poem, who took a photo and submitted it, or who penciled a cartoon came to realize in their own way the power of human creativity. And this wasn’t just a personal discovery. The Chicano/a press was a collaborative enterprise, often conceptualized and produced at coffee shops such as La Piranya in Los Angeles, in living rooms, near departmental mimeograph machines alongside supportive faculty of all races, or in community centers such as the Crusade for Justice headquarters in Denver.99 When they were distributed at rallies, in Safeway parking lots, or in classrooms, a powerful Chicano/a feedback loop was instantiated, one that allowed for constructive conversation apart from dominant media, and one that helped to forge bonds of friendship and community. The Chicano/a press was, like all “underground” presses, an ephemeral institution. Some publications had runs of only one issue, and eventually even the most successful of them had to shut down shop. The

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transience of the Chicano/a press kept it on the margins of U.S. society. It also meant that much of the archive of the Chicano/a press—where and when particular publications were produced, how they were distributed, who read them and why—is all but lost to history. But the ephemerality of the Chicano/a press also had its advantages. Since Chicano/a publications were not wedded to state institutions or to business interests, editors could publish material that was experimental in its form or radical in its content. Chicano/a nationalism was a spectrum of ideologies that attacked American exceptionalism, class inequality, and white supremacy. In the early 1970s, there was a noticeable shift in movement rhetoric away from a more nationalist framework and toward a more class-oriented and internationalist politics.100 As it was for Chicano/a cultural nationalism, the Chicano/a press became a vital forum for the articulation of a Chicano/a Marxism and a crucial instrument in the formation of what Cynthia Young has called “the U.S. Third World Left.”101 Antonio Gomez’s short essay “Un solo mundo” gives us a glimpse of what this emergent Chicano/a socialism looked like. Published in March 1969 in Con Safos, the essay says that “Indio-Hispanics and Blacks living in the United States cannot be satisfied with improving their economic and social position but must affirm their willingness to work for the elimination of social oppression and economic exploitation of all people throughout the world.”102 Activists who saw cultural autonomy as the guiding principle of the movement viewed the shift toward socialism as a painful betrayal, but many believed the goals of Chicano/a nationalism and the core principles of socialism were not all that far apart. Involvement in the Third World Left deepened connections between Mexican American activism and other leftist campaigns in the United States and abroad. These links were manifest in the pages of the Chicano/a press. Between June 1970 and January 1971, the editors of the Black Panther lent considerable column space to leaders of the defense campaign for Los Siete de La Raza, a group of young Latinos from Central America who were charged in the killing of an undercover police officer in San Francisco’s Mission District. The Black Panther Party already had substantive connections to Chicano/a and Latino/a politics: Reies López Tijerina and Corky Gonzales were public participants in the high-profile “Free Huey” campaign, and Panther gatherings were sometimes held at La Piranya, the Chicano/a café.103 Panther support for the “righteous Latin brothers” of Los Siete strengthened these ties and helped bring about their acquittal. In 1971, a movement delegation traveled to Vancouver to build grassroots alliances with a delegation of women from

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Vietnam. Comprised mainly of Chicana feminists, the group contributed to the making of a Third World feminism.104 For all of their idiosyncracies and imperfections, publications such as El Gallo, Adelante Raza!, La Raza, and El Renacimiento were erected on an aesthetic of dialogue and debate, an aesthetic at odds with television’s one-directional flow. The only real form of talking back in television is through the occasional focus group, or through the depersonalized rating system. The Chicano/a press encouraged participation, and it challenged an economic system in which value—whether of art or of people—is measured only in dollars and cents. Television outlived the Chicano/a press, at least as the press was configured in the 1960s and 1970s. Mimeograph machines disappeared, and many of the organizations that drove the Chicano/a press disbanded. But the vision inherent in the Chicano/a press of a more democratic cultural politics remains. This vision extended to other forms of media. The next chapter explores how visual Chicano/a artists used painting and other visual arts to negotiate the racial politics of modern environmentalism. Like the activists working with film, television, and print, visual artists such as Santa Barraza broke down barriers to a cultural sphere that had long excluded Mexican Americans.

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Green Aztlán: Environmentalism and the Chicano/a Visual Arts

On April 22, 1970, millions of people gathered in cities and towns across the United States for what turned out to be one of the largest political mobilizations in the nation’s history.1 That first Earth Day made environmentalism a focal point of American political discourse. Individuals who once had only a passing concern about ecology began to change their everyday behaviors. Richard Nixon, ordinarily no friend of federal regulation, established the Environmental Protection Agency. Congress quickly approved major pieces of legislation, including the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. Four decades later, Earth Day has become a sort of unofficial national holiday. Even the profithungry corporations that were the major targets of activist anger in 1970 have gotten in on the act, inventing catchy slogans and manufacturing environmentally-themed merchandise in order to stay ahead of public opinion.2 Arturo Sandoval, a Chicano from New Mexico, was one of the principal organizers of the historic event. He makes an appearance in Robert Stone’s television documentary Earth Days (2009), which shows Sandoval seated in front of a “We Are the People of Aztlán” poster at the mobilization’s P Street headquarters in Washington, D.C.3 Conventional wisdom often sees environmentalism as a “white thing” comprised of boutique shopping, organic cooking, wilderness escapes, and other racially coded activities. It even gets represented occasionally as a twenty-first-century update to the colonial nineteenth-century “white man’s burden.” The reality of environmentalism, though, is considerably more complex than

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this. One recent study indicates that when asked about specific environmental problems, Latinos/as are more concerned about ecological issues than non-Hispanic whites.4 Other studies have found considerable concern among African Americans as well.5 Environmental awareness among racial minorities is not new. Prior to European invasion, indigenous peoples in New England made use of complex crop rotation systems that gave the land time to replenish, and they performed controlled burns to generate nutrient-rich soil. As William Cronon explains, Indians occasionally overtaxed the land, but they were not the squanderers that colonizers made them out to be. Historians have located an environmentalism that emerged during slavery, in which forced labor on the land gave blacks a keener knowledge of the land and a greater respect for its power than was found among their white oppressors. The Spanish-speaking Hispanos of New Mexico’s Rio Chama Valley developed a pastoral commons and an acequía (aqueduct) system that prevented the overuse of land and water. Though overlooked, these histories form a foundation for the contemporary environmental justice movement.6 They also subvert any notion that racial minorities have a less sophisticated relationship to the environment than whites. Devon Peña, Laura Pulido, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Alejandro Lugo, and Sharada Balachandran Orihuela and Andrew Hageman, among others, have written insightfully on the connections between Mexican American activism and environmental politics.7 However, little attention has been paid to the complex relationship between the Chicano civil rights movement and the modern environmentalist movement, even though they appeared on the public stage simultaneously. Like their peers, Mexican Americans in the 1960s and 1970s were growing increasingly concerned about the impact of industrialization on the nonhuman natural world. Their concern was evident in many places: in speeches made on college campuses and at rallies; in the pages of pamphlets and newspapers; on buttons, signs, and other ephemera; and in a range of artistic works. Chicano/a progressives felt alienated, though, by mainstream environmentalism’s sharp philosophical distinction between human and nonhuman need. They were repelled also by a popular “zero population growth” movement that frequently blamed poor people of color for ecological problems created by overconsuming elites. Arturo Sandoval and other Mexican American activists faced a dilemma. If they joined leading organizations like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, they would likely find themselves surrounded by people

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who were largely ignorant about Chicano/a politics, and who often misrepresented the impact of immigration on the United States. But if they ignored environmental issues, they did a disservice to themselves and to their communities. Their response was to formulate a distinctive Chicano/a environmentalism, one that drew on Mexican American traditions and that joined ecological concerns with social concerns. The indigenous mythology of Aztlán proved especially important. For many, this imagined space of national belonging symbolized an appealing alternative to the perceived greed and wastefulness of “gringo” society.8 Cultural production played an essential role in constructing this emergent environmental politics. In part because Chicanos/as lacked meaningful representation in education, media, and government, they turned to the arts in order to recover examples of Mexican American conservation, and to imagine an alternative environmentalism built on equal concern for human and nonhuman life. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction prose, theater, music, and even dance were all made part of this project, but the visual arts were especially important, as cultural activists understood that problems of perception are at the root of the ecological crisis brought on by industrialization. Individuals and societies only tolerate environmental destruction when they cannot see how the commodities they consume get made, and when they cannot picture the consequences of their consumption. Chicano/a environmental art challenges viewers to see how their world is made, and at what cost. It also invites them to envision other, more thriving worlds. Juana Alicia, Alfredo Arreguín, Judith F. Baca, Daniel Desiga, Rupert Garcia, Ester Hernandez, Carmen Lomas Garza, Delilah Montoya, Camille Rose Garcia, and Jesse Treviño are just a few of the visual artists who have contributed to the making of this Green aesthetic within Chicano/a art. Some works in this tradition situate ecological themes in the background. Carlos Almaraz’s celebrated painting West Coast Crash (1982) is first and foremost a meditation on human mortality, but it also prompts the viewer to consider the impact that automobile culture has had on the landscapes of the United States. There are many works, though, that have an explicit focus on the relation between humans and nonhumans in nature. The mixed-media creations of Texan painter Santa Barraza are a particularly powerful example of how Mexican American artists have used visual media to challenge prevailing opinion about environmentalism and its meanings for minority communities. During the 1960s and 1970s, Barraza participated in the Chicano movement and was shaped by its progressive ideals and its rich historical imagination.

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She remains committed to Chicano/a art and politics, and she has created a portfolio that captures Chicano/a environmentalism’s union of social and ecological concern. Given the increased economic and political vulnerability of minorities in the United States, and in view of the declining health of global ecosystems everywhere, the vision Barraza communicates of a more inclusive and a more engaged environmentalism remains as urgent today as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

Environmental History and Chicano/a Politics Many people think of environmentalism as a contemporary movement born of modern science. However, evidence suggests that humans have long worried about the impact of their actions on the nonhuman world around them. Historian Richard Grove says a conservationist ethic can be located in the classical writings of Theophrastus, a Greek botanist and philosopher who feared that humans were destabilizing the climate.9 According to Grove, this concern intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when scientists for the British East India Company and the French Compagnie des Indes started measuring the impact of deforestation on ecosystems in the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific, and the Indian subcontinent. Often drawing on indigenous knowledge about the local environs, colonial naturalists such as Pierre Poivre developed conservation practices that safeguarded the long-term interests of their employers. They also laid the foundations for modern environmentalist thought. Their writings about the island of Mauritius and the forests outside of Calcutta shaped Romantic conceptions of nature as an Edenic space in need of protection from the dangers of human activity. Romanticism’s rigorous epistemological divide between humanity and nature was brought to American shores by European colonizers and their descendants. Thomas Jefferson studied colonial naturalists such as Pierre Poivre and incorporated their philosophy into his vision of the American landscape, which for him was untainted by the moral and material pollution of the “Old World.”10 Conservationists George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold were even more influential. Their gendered discourse of a beautiful but vulnerable wilderness that needed protection from the technological force of “mankind” became a dominant mode of thinking about the environment, particularly in the postwar decades, when the atomic bomb made imaginable the complete annihilation of nature. Environmentalism spread in the 1960s and 1970s not only because of new scientific data, but also because

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Green rhetoric promised “organic” experience in a consumer world that increasingly seemed artificial and lethal. Even our vocabulary changed. The word “environmentalist” was once a technical term that referred to behavioralists. During the 1970s, it entered the English lexicon as a political label.11 Mexican Americans, like their peers, were concerned about the toll that industrialization was taking on global ecologies. On April 22, 1970, some three hundred Chicanos/as assembled in the Barelas neighborhood of Albuquerque to observe Earth Day. Protesters called for stronger protections against pollution and waste. But unlike most rallies, the New Mexico event made explicit connections between racism and environmental degradation. In comments that were aired nationally that evening on a CBS Earth Day special, Arturo Sandoval declared: “We are going to make people understand that the kind of things that causes air pollution and water pollution are the same kind of things that cause racism, that cause poverty, that cause hunger in this country.” The crowd then marched forward with cries of “¡Unidos Venceremos!” (We will triumph!) and “¡Viva la Raza!” (Long live the people!). Bob Schieffer reported that “an undercurrent of cynicism” was apparent that day. Participants struggled to reconcile the American public’s sudden support for environmental regulations with their growing hostility toward civil rights and labor rights. Program anchor Walter Cronkite was more blunt. He claimed that “although some Negroes did take part, Negro leadership was conspicuously absent. Black militants and campus radicals have criticized the environmental campaign, calling it a white, middle-class diversion from the issues of Vietnam and race.”12 Cronkite was right in his description of the fissures that divided racial minorities and mainstream environmentalism in the postwar decades. Many white progressives abandoned civil rights activism in the late 1960s. Some had done so because they felt marginalized by militants in SNCC and other organizations. Others were burned out, or they were captivated by the mystical New Age rhetoric that permeated the environmentalist movement. Activist Hunter Gitlin says of Earth Day that “at that point I ceased to be an antiwar activist and became an environmentalist.”13 The late 1960s was a crossroads moment when progressive activists could have linked ecological devastation to social injustice as part of a coordinated campaign for a more livable, less profit-obsessed world. Some did, but not enough. Instead the civil rights movement was undermined by white flight, and the environmentalist movement was weakened by its own myopia. Many Mexican

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Americans and other racial minorities felt reluctant to join organizations that defended nonhuman life but ignored threats—ecological and otherwise—to humans. The reality is that while environmentalism claims to speak for all of humanity, in practice it has been rooted in the politics of race and power. John Muir, a patron saint among U.S. conservationists, has long been celebrated for his efforts to protect the American wilderness from the destructive forces of industrialization. Muir’s successful campaign to preserve the Yosemite Valley was impressive, but his motivations were not. When Muir trekked through California’s Sierra Nevada range during the 1870s, he carried with him “contemporary fears and attitudes about race that led him to conclude that not everyone belonged in his beloved mountain cathedrals.”14 Muir adopted a paternalistic attitude toward the region’s Spanish-speaking and Chinese residents, and at times he was downright hostile toward the “mostly ugly, and some of them altogether hideous” Indians, whom he believed had “no right place in the landscape.”15 Muir argued for white guardianship of the land, championing the U.S. Army’s occupation of Yosemite as a deterrent against Indian degradation, and naively ignoring the long-term damage that scientific control and mass tourism would do to the continent’s majestic wilderness.16 During the 1960s and 1970s, these “hidden attachments to race”17 were most evident in the faddish campaign for “zero population growth.” The United States was in the midst of the largest population boom in its history, and concern about world numbers was growing. On July 18, 1969, Richard Nixon submitted an influential statement to Congress describing overpopulation as “one of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century.”18 In true Washington fashion, Nixon called for a commission to study the problem. Newspapers, magazines, and television programs ran sensational reports with headlines that read “Fighting to Save the Earth from Man,” or “Population: Boom or Doom?”19 Earth Day organizers made overpopulation one of their central concerns. Stephanie Mills, the radical activist who became famous for a 1969 commencement address entitled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax,” renewed her call for restricted reproduction.20 On Fifth Avenue in New York, crowds chanted “Stop at Two.”21 Republican Senator Bob Packwood said he would “consider it a mark of progress if we achieve a zero population growth rate.”22 Packwood complained that he had few allies in Congress, but he had many supporters in the general public. Like the shag haircut and the miniskirt, zero population growth had become trendy.

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The man largely responsible for this trend was Paul Ehrlich. The Stanford biologist had become a minor celebrity with the publication of the 1968 best seller The Population Bomb, which opens with this apocalyptic passage: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”23 Time would disprove Ehrlich’s predictions, but his arresting prose, his zeal, and his scientific credentials quickly established him as the country’s leading authority on global demography. The Population Bomb sold more than 2 million copies.24 Ehrlich made multiple appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he became a fixture on the college lecture circuit and at Earth Day events. Ehrlich, Kenneth Watt, and other scientists warning of an overpopulation crisis were received as objective authorities. However, their arguments relied on the unscientific residues of colonial prejudice, as did the rhetoric of many in the zero population growth movement. In his introduction to The Population Bomb, Ehrlich explains how he became aware of the coming disaster. His family was riding through Delhi “one stinking hot night” in the summer of 1966 when he encountered “people thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.”25 Ehrlich was terrified. He says that although he had “understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time,” only in India did he experience “the feel of overpopulation.”26 These lines reflect more than the earnest fears of a husband and father. Indians have long had to endure the human exploitation and ecological degradation caused by British rule. Ehrlich was a cosmopolitan, but the opening of The Population Bomb reads as a metropole’s first real encounter with global inequality. In 1979, Ehrlich turned his attentions to the Rio Grande when he warned that “nothing resembling the present American way of life can persist if the Mexican population continues to increase as it has for the last 20 years and the border between the United States and Mexico remains open.”27 Ehrlich’s tone was more measured than the worst xenophobes of his day, and unlike most in the anti-immigrant movement, he criticized American overconsumption. But his framing of Mexicanness as an emergent threat to the American landscape was a repackaging of the nineteenth-century rhetoric of U.S. expansion. In 1840, Richard Henry Dana’s best-selling Two Years Before the Mast described California’s Mexican population as “an idle, thriftless people”

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whose “character” kept them from properly tending the land.28 Similar arguments were made about Hispanos of New Mexico. The explorer and naturalist Josiah Gregg wrote in Commerce of the Prairies that the people of New Mexico “grope their way in darkness and in ignorance.”29 Rhetoric of this sort laid the groundwork for American invasion in 1846 and created the enduring perception that Mexicans threaten the purity of American soil. Inasmuch as it is defined by overconsumption and underregulation, “the American way of life” mentioned by Ehrlich is a far greater threat to national and international ecologies than Mexican migration. The only just response to the ongoing political tragedy at the U.S.-Mexico border is demilitarization and a recognition of the human right to a living wage, but instead of asking readers to expand their sense of moral obligation, Ehrlich directed them to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a reactionary organization that uses slanted history and distorted numbers to embellish its nativism.30 Mexican Americans heard the racial undertones of the zero population growth movement and recognized them for what they were. Speaking to students at Arizona State University on October 14, 1970, the Crusade for Justice leader Corky Gonzales said that “they come around and they tell us . . . these abstract things. . . . They say, ‘You have a problem: birth control. You better control all your kids ’cause that’s your economic problem.”31 For Gonzales, the rhetoric of overpopulation was a ruse. He described it as an effort by elites to suppress political opposition, and he urged his audience to remain militant: “they say, don’t have any more children there ’cause they may turn out like that revolutionary [Brazilian radical Carlos Marighella] we had to kill last year. . . . The Mexicano, the Chicano . . . will no longer stand back and wait in line.” Gonzales wanted blame placed where blame was due. Activists could not embrace a movement with such clear racial animus. But neither could they ignore the mounting scientific evidence of environmental deterioration, or miss its impact on their own communities. They therefore began to develop a distinctive Chicano/a environmentalism that looked to Mexican cultures in America as sources of inspiration and guidance in building an alternative, healthier modernity. The feminist activist Enriqueta Vasquez’s editorials in the influential periodical El Grito del Norte illustrate the dimensions of this emergent environmentalism. Published regularly between 1968 and 1972, her column “¡Despierten Hermanos!” (Wake up, brothers and sisters) tackled a range of issues affecting Chicano/a communities, including welfare

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rights, cultural preservation, housing discrimination, and educational opportunity. Vasquez was clearly influenced by Earth Day preparations. The January 17, 1970, article “Smog and Money Politics” echoed popular concern about air pollution and called for better public transportation and cleaner cars. But while environmentalists either ignored Chicanos/as or viewed them with suspicion, Vasquez addressed Mexican Americans as vital constituents in the Green movement. She contrasted the peopleoriented values of “Raza” culture with the profit-oriented values of dominant U.S. society, arguing that “when we look at the smog situation . . . it looks to me like humans are beginning to die because of POLITICS and MONEY. See why we say Tío Sam [Uncle Sam] is a DOLLAR culture?”32 The effects of this “dollar culture” were all too apparent in New Mexico, where Vasquez lived and where El Grito del Norte was published. The state and federal government has a long history of seizing land from New Mexican Indian and Hispano communities in the name of conservation, only to then lease or sell that same land to nuclear, tourist, and mining interests.33 Vasquez expressed concern that “the only thing that Tío Sam will listen to anymore is violence and demonstration.”34 Experience made her pessimistic about the state’s willingness to remedy environmental damage, but she was optimistic about the power of grassroots organizing. In a November 15, 1969, column, she envisioned the creation of independent and sustainable communities based on Chicano/a traditions and feminist values: Let’s say that a co-op of about six such families would buy about ten acres of land. . . . Once these families get themselves built-in, they could begin to think about planting and growing crops to feed themselves and learn from the land. And this is the beauty of the whole thing, in that they would be cultivating themselves and also be teaching the young ones how to relate to the earth. These women could actually build a satisfying home life for themselves and their families. They could work and play together with the children and they could study together and learn about nature, crops, and life in general. There would be a deep spiritual relationship and bond there.35 Vasquez had received welfare benefits when she lived in Colorado with her two children.36 She knew firsthand how working-class women become ensnared in cycles of poverty, but she also saw how antiracist,

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antisexist activism could improve people’s lives. Some might argue that Vasquez was being naïve in imagining a cooperative alternative to the isolated postwar nuclear family. The 1960s certainly had its share of utopian experiments that began as dreams and ended as nightmares, but Vasquez’s plan was no youthful pipe dream. In 1968, she and her new husband, Bill Longeaux y Vasquez, purchased an adobe house in New Mexico’s Sangre de Christo Mountains and began teaching at the Vincent Ranch.37 The Longeaux y Vasquez home was not a cooperative in the purest sense, but it served as a popular retreat for movement activists, and it cemented Vasquez’s lifelong commitment to sustainability as a Chicano/a ethic. Vasquez lived in close proximity to a hippie counterculture that saw the “Land of Enchantment” as an escape from the regimentation of dominant American society. The relationship between Mexican Americans in New Mexico and los hippies was complex. Members of the counterculture, most of them white, were sympathetic to the Hispano/a struggle for land rights, decent jobs, and cultural protection. Hippies studied the history of indigenous and Hispanic communities in New Mexico, and they were largely supportive of Chicano/a political campaigns, including successful efforts to bring the radical theater collective El Teatro Campesino to Taos in the summer of 1970. For their part, Hispanos/as and Chicanos/ as sympathized with the counterculture’s critique of dominant society. Some were even curious about counterculture lifestyles. Diana Valdez, a native New Mexican, “dated a few gringos” while in college, though it meant being criticized by some in her community.38 A handful of young Chicanos/as attended experimental schools such as the Taos Learning Center. But there was tension between the groups as well. Locals resented the fact that hippies were driving up real-estate prices and making it harder for Hispanos to own heritage lands. Many residents had a “liveand-let-live” attitude toward countercultural lifestyles, but conservative members of northern New Mexican communities took offense at hippie sexual libertinism and drug use. These tensions occasionally devolved into harassment and violence, as John Nichols depicts in his 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War. Progressive Chicanos/as shared the hippie hatred of America’s “plastic culture,” but they looked elsewhere for alternatives. Vasquez insisted in one of her editorials that unlike the hippies, “we [Mexican Americans] have a good way of life already. We know the land well. It is ours.”39 Her claim that “We know the land well” is an invocation of Aztlán, a prominent movement myth and a cornerstone of Vasquez’s

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Chicano/a environmentalism. According to indigenous legend, this “land of the white heron” was home to the Aztecs until an ecological crisis forced them into exile. Tribal prophets instructed the people to migrate south and to establish a new nation when they encountered a snake-eating eagle perched upon a cactus. They made Tenochtitlán the capital of Mexico, which still has on its flag el aguila y la serpiente (the eagle and the serpent). Some versions of the myth claim the descendants of the Aztecs will return to their northern homeland during el quinto sol, a period of “the fifth sun” when the natural order will be restored. No one can say with certainty how much of this legend is fact and how much is fiction. That doesn’t matter, though, because Aztlán’s power as a political tool has less to do with historical accuracy than with cultural resonance. Mary Pat Brady claims the Aztec legend has been part of a tradition of folk resistance among Mexican-identified communities in the United States since at least the 1870s.40 In 1962, Native American scholar Jack Forbes introduced this mythology to new audiences in a mimeograph entitled “The Mexican Heritage of Aztlán (the Southwest) to 1821.” The document claimed that “the heritage of Anáhuac [a rough synonym of Aztlán], in its indigenous, Hispano-Mexican, modern Mexican, or Mexican-American manifestations, is a living part of the past, the present, and the future of the United States.”41 According to historian John Chávez, Forbes’s publication circulated informally during the 1960s among Chicano/a activists, who found in Aztlán a compelling counternarrative to Eurocentric histories of the United States.42 At the 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, the poet Alurista appropriated the Aztec myth in the preamble to his manifesto “El plan espiritual de Aztlán” (The spiritual plan of Aztlán): In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal “Gringo” invasion of our territories: We, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan, from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.43 Commentators have described Alurista’s reading of “El plan espiritual de Aztlán” at the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference as a foundational moment of cultural nationalism. His phrase “in the spirit of a new people” was indeed a novel expression of a communal sensibility that

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had long existed among Mexicans in the United States. Alurista’s poem transformed Aztlán into a leading trope of the Chicano movement. “El plan espiritual de Aztlán” makes a powerful link between the human domain of Chicano/a politics and the larger natural order of the universe when it declares that Chicanos/as are a “people of the sun” who are “reclaiming the land of their birth.” Later he urges his audience to reject the artificial “gringo dollar value system” with its “economic slavery, political exploitation, ethnic and cultural psychological destruction, and denial of civil and human rights.”44 He proposes instead the adoption of “cultural background and values which ignore materialism and embrace humanism” and which “sustain an economic base for healthy growth and development.”45 The word “sustain” has become an important part of the environmentalist lexicon. Cultural nationalism has undergone significant revision since Alurista’s performance in 1969, but “El plan espiritual de Aztlán” remains relevant because it outlines a model of sustainability that united social justice and environmental protection through an emphasis on labor. Lee Bebout explains that “‘El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán’ . . . argued that the land belongs to those who work it, drawing upon and reinforcing the notion of an organic connection to the land as well as the working-class nature of the Chicano struggle.”46 Free-market economies rest on the ability of private industries to produce profits by depreciating labor and by shifting social and ecological costs to the public. Alurista envisions an alternative economy built on the recognition of a shared moral obligation to “our lands” and to “those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops.” He calls this alternative Aztlán, and he imagines it a place governed not by profit margins and efficiencies, but by “the process of love and brotherhood.”47 Feminist commentators have long argued that cultural nationalist rhetoric tends to valorize manhood and to devalue women and their contributions to the movement.48 With its conspicuous silence on women’s issues and its idealization of the “love for our brothers” that “makes us a people,” Alurista’s manifesto reflects this masculinist orientation. However, Enriqueta Vasquez’s writings prove that nationalism is not in and of itself antifeminist. Her version of cultural nationalism incorporated feminist principles, forming what Dionne Espinoza calls a distinctive “feminist nationalism.”49 Vasquez was able to use the myth of Aztlán as inspiration for a more humane and more sustainable way of life. Her November 1969 column “La Santa Tierra” (The holy land) put it succinctly: “We are the Mestizo nation of Aztlán, the nation of mixed blood. . . . We cannot go the Gringo way. We choose; we go the

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way of the land; the way of the earth; the way of the water; the way of the wind; the way of AZTLÁN.”50 Neither Vasquez nor Alurista used the word “environmentalist” to describe their philosophy because the word was encumbered by the racism of overpopulation rhetoric and by mainstream environmentalism’s neglect of social issues. Both writers, though, wanted to make issues of ecology a part of the Chicano movement. Their appropriation of Aztlán was a step in that direction. Several grassroots environmental initiatives accompanied these intellectual efforts, the most prominent being the United Farm Workers’ antipesticide campaign. At the end of 1967, the UFW found itself facing a crisis. The huelga (strike) had been under way for more than two years, workers were broke, and the growers were showing little sign of surrender. A new strategy was needed, so UFW leaders decided in January 1968 to broaden public support by making pesticides a central issue in their campaign.51 César Chávez, Ester Hernandez, Jessica Govea, Corky Gonzales, and Juana Alicia all knew firsthand the health risks of pesticides such as DDT, since they had worked in the fields as children. The UFW began to draw parallels between an increase in food-related epidemics and the abuse of farmworkers, arguing that both were caused by a greedy insistence on profits over people. Chávez made this case on national television, while other members fanned out to grocery stores from Los Angeles to New York and distributed pamphlets that warned consumers of a correlation between contaminated grapes and specific health risks, including birth defects and cancer. The tactic was a success. Bumper stickers with the slogan “No Grapes” appeared on cars across the country. By 1969, negative publicity and declining sales forced grape producers such as Perelli-Mineti and Sons to sign contracts mandating better wages, regular breaks, and limitations on how and where pesticides should be applied.52 Farmworker wages continued to climb well into the 1970s, reaching their historic peak in 1978.53 The UFW’s antipesticide campaign showed activists that environmental issues could be used to strengthen rather than distract from civil rights efforts. It also got members of the public thinking (many for the first time) about how their food is made, and at what cost to them, to workers, and to ecosystems. The farmworker strike is widely acknowledged as a major moment in U.S. labor history. It deserves recognition as a major moment in environmental history as well. The land-rights activism of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Land Grant Alliance) was another instance of an emergent Chicano/a environmentalism. In 1963, former Pentecostal preacher Reies López

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Tijerina founded this pivotal movement organization after moving to northern New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande Valley from his native Texas.54 The Hispanos who lived in the rural region formed a close-knit community. They were inheritors of a long tradition of resistance to domination, one that included the midnight fence-cutting raids of the secretive Gorras Blancas (White Caps) society during the 1880s and 1890s. Nearly all Hispanos faced extreme poverty, and many told detailed stories of lands stolen from their ancestors by violence and by shady legal maneuvers following the Mexican-American War. As one sheepherder told Peter Nabokov, they carry the feeling of injustice “in their hearts, even if they don’t say anything.”55 Tijerina immersed himself in the land-rights struggle. He became a student of New Mexican history, Latin American politics, and international law. He even lived for a time in Mexico City, where he combed library archives for information on the political intrigue surrounding the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.56 The Alianza was fueled by collective energy, but Tijerina’s intellect and his stirring speeches made him a compelling spokesperson. He published in local newspapers, gave regular radio addresses on KABQ in Albuquerque, and traveled to college campuses, churches, and union halls across the country.57 The land-grant cause became a focal point of the movement as activists embraced the struggle in New Mexico as a symbol of the historical injustices done to Chicanos/as throughout the United States. On October 15, 1966, more than three hundred aliancistas occupied a small section of the Kit Carson National Forest. They claimed sovereignty on behalf of the people of San Joaquín del Río de Chama, a land-grant community established under Spanish law in 1806. When two park rangers confronted the group, members arrested the officers, convicted them of trespass before a mock court, and released them with fines and suspended sentences. The occupation of the Echo Ampitheater came to a bloodless end on October 24, but tensions in the region remained high. Rumors circulated of an imminent Cuba-inspired revolution. On June 5, 1967, the dramatic story of the Alianza movement reached its climax. A small group of approximately twenty armed men came to the county courthouse in Tierra Amarilla and attempted a citizen’s arrest of district attorney Alfonso Sánchez, who had issued warrants for Alianza leadership. Details of the ensuing shootout are hazy, but by its end two officers were injured, one of them critically. The Alianza never fully recovered from the tragic events at Tierra Amarilla. The target of a massive police and National Guard manhunt in the Rio Sangre de Christo Mountains, Tijerina was captured on June

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9. In one of the movement’s most dramatic legal cases, Tijerina acted as his own counsel before a state court and was declared “not guilty” on capital charges that included kidnapping, unlawful assault on a jail, and unlawful imprisonment. The sympathetic jury seemingly accepted the argument that aliancistas were acting in self-defense. Tijerina was not so fortunate in federal court, however. On November 11, 1967, the leader was convicted on two charges of assault related to the Echo Ampitheater occupation. Tijerina spent more than three years in prison and was barred from any further association with the Alianza. The organization’s infrastructure survived into the 1980s, but it eventually collapsed under the weight of years of infighting and government harassment.58 The Alianza won no major political victories, and its efforts to reclaim lands stolen by the federal government were quixotic. The organization is a case study in what can go wrong when social movements resort to violence, but it also reveals the danger of hasty judgments about success and failure in the political realm. The Alianza strengthened alliances between Mexican Americans and American Indians, especially in New Mexico, where relations between the two populations historically ran hot and cold. Aliancistas supported the Taos Pueblo’s successful efforts to reclaim Blue Lake from the federal government, and the Pueblos in return backed Hispano demands for greater cultural and legal protections.59 The land-rights struggle forged cross-regional connections. César Chávez and Corky Gonzales had different ideological orientations, but both activists supported the Alianza. Though committed to nonviolence, Chávez wrote a public letter of solidarity, and Gonzalez and other Crusade for Justice members gave logistical and financial support while Tijerina was in jail.60 Their support mirrored the sentiment of most Chicanos/as. The Alianza campaign also played an important role in the formation of Chicano/a environmentalism. For decades, forest managers and preservationists described Hispanos as a threat to the perceived wilds of northern New Mexico. As geographer Jake Kosek explains, their “notions of forest protection and care became bound up with a colonial racial prejudice; rangers’ views of Hispanos as backward, uneducated, and lazy resurfaced in their estimation of Hispano land use practices.”61 Conservationists and land managers have claimed that subsistence logging and sheep grazing endangers the region’s delicate ecosystem, and they have persuaded the state and federal government to enact strict regulations on Hispano land use.62 There are rare instances when particular individuals or communities have exhausted water, grass, or timber resources.

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Hispanos, though, have generally balanced the countervailing pressures of consumption and conservation, which is not surprising given their long tenure in the arid region. Ironically, the very forces that claim to be preserving New Mexico’s wilderness are the ones destroying it. In the name of conservation, they have made the region into a recreation destination for the wealthy, a corporate timber factory, and a nuclear research facility. Hispanos were and are still keenly aware of this irony. As Peter Nabokov elegantly puts it: “When they [Hispanos] are forbidden to cut stove wood but witness large logging firms move into ancestral lands, they become frustrated. . . . [T]hey still carry the memory, difficult for an Anglo to understand, that this land was a Spanish pueblo’s holding, never to be sold, always to be enjoyed and to yield communally.”63 In contrast to mainstream environmentalism, the Alianza did not fetishize the New Mexican landscape. Instead they used their cultural heritage as a resource for confronting state and corporate power and for building a grassroots environmental justice movement. There were other less high-profile environmental initiatives in the movement. The Crusade for Justice founded a boarding school at New Mexico’s Vincent Ranch, famous in Chicano/a history as the location of the film Salt of the Earth (1954). Designed as an alternative to the impoverished schools of Denver barrios, Escuela Tlatelolco taught Chicano/a history and culture alongside more traditional subjects. It also gave urban youth the chance to hike and to ranch and to see a world beyond the barrio.64 As mentioned above, many Mexican Americans participated in the first Earth Day. Mexican Americans also participated in the 1976 “Working for Environmental and Economic Justice and Jobs” conference that was organized by the University of Michigan and the United Auto Workers. According to historian Bunyan Bryant, the event marked the first occasion when the phrase “environmental justice” was used to describe integration of civil rights activism and environmentalism.65 As in other areas, the arts became a vital forum for creating and communicating an environmentalist agenda within the Chicano movement. Cultural producers used painting and illustration, literature, music, dance, theater, and other media as tools for articulating Chicano/a environmentalism. These artists wanted to get Mexican Americans and other raza communities thinking differently about nature, to see concern for nature as part of their cultural heritage. They wanted to push back on the belief among whites that minorities were less concerned about environmental issues. Above all, Chicano/a artists wanted audiences of all backgrounds to reconsider the faulty divide between civil

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rights and environmental responsibilities, between the natural and the human, between what is given and what is possible. As we will see in the next section, the work of movement artists such as Santa Barraza offers a compelling example of how creative expression can be mobilized in progressive campaigns for a more sustainable world.

Visualizing Nature: The Environmentalist Aesthetic of Santa Barraza Cultural expression was more than ornamentation for the Chicano movement. During the 1960s and 1970s, literature, the visual arts, theater, dance, music, and other artistic forms did vital political work. They attracted new participants to the cause; they created common symbols for people of different regional, class, and linguistic backgrounds; they inspired; they entertained; they helped recover neglected cultural traditions; they served as catalysts for debate; and they educated outsiders about the rich history of Mexicans in the United States. Less appreciated, and less understood, is the fact that the arts were also important in the early making of a distinctive Chicano/a environmentalism. Consider Corky Gonzales’s epic verse Yo soy Joaquín, which was first published independently by the Crusade for Justice in 1967, and two years later was published by the mainstream house Bantam Books. The poem tells the story of a mythical hero who, when the reader first meets him, is “lost in a world of confusion / caught up in the whirl of a gringo society.”66 He draws strength, though, as he recalls his people’s history. By the end of the poem, the protagonist can proudly announce: I am the masses of my people and I refuse to be absorbed. I am Joaquín. The odds are great but my spirit is strong, my faith unbreakable, my blood is pure.67 This much-anthologized work is often cited as an exemplar of Chicano/a nationalist ideology. Typically unnoticed, though, is the way in which the poem appeals to nationalist feeling through a rhetoric of ecology. The narrative is built around a stark contrast between the death-dealing, unnatural “Anglo” world and the life-giving, natural world of his raza, or “people.” The narrator laments:

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Yes, I have come a long way to nowhere, unwillingly dragged by that monstrous, technical, industrial giant called Progress And Anglo success. . . . The 1972 Bantam edition has two black-and-white photographs accompanying this page. The first photo shows a Chicana worker looking tiredly at the camera as she leans on the sorting machine at an onion factory in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The second photo shows a man with an impersonal expression cutting garments at a warehouse in Culver City, California. The layout suggests that like the speaker of the poem, these two Chicanos/as have been alienated both from their cultural heritage and from the earth by “a foreign people” that: frowned upon our way of life and took what they could use. Our art, our literature, our music, they ignored— so they left the real things of value and grabbed at their own destruction by their greed and avarice. They overlooked that cleansing fountain of nature and brotherhood which is Joaquín. Mainstream environmentalism tends to separate ecological problems from social injustice, even though both have what the poem calls “greed and avarice” as their source. Gonzales’s description of Joaquín as a “fountain of nature and brotherhood” is a poetic attempt to reunite these concerns. By the end of the poem, the hero symbolizes for the reader an individual’s restored relationship to culture, to humanity, and to the broader natural world. The poem has flaws. The speaker relies on a masculinist vocabulary to describe this restoration, saying that “I must fight / and win this struggle / for my sons.”68 Also, the poem’s romanticizing of a cultural union with nature keeps it from giving readers a more practical vision of what a Chicano/a environmentalism might look like. But the poem is notable as an influential attempt at using cultural expression

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to lay the foundations of an environmentalist thought within progressive Mexican American politics. Daniel Valdez attempted something similar in “América de los indios” (America of the Indians), a song that appeared on his 1974 album Mestizo (A&M Records). The song, performed in Spanish, opens with an apocalyptic image of nature laid waste by an unknown force: “Surcando el cielo de América / Sangre de viento avanzando, forma de fuego en la noche / En ruina de allí” (Crossing the skies of America, / Blood of advancing wind, shape of fire in the night / From there in ruin). The music accelerates from this stanza’s slow, lonely rhythm dominated by guitar, flute, and drum, toward a fast-tempo orchestral sound. The mestizos of the American hemisphere seem to be rising up, transforming death into life as they work the land: “Manos de bronce en la tierra / Flor de sudor van sembrando, Esperanzas de los pobres / Nacen aquí” (Bronze-colored hands in the earth / They are sowing the flower of perspiration / The hopes of the poor / Are born here). The symbolist lyrics of “Américo de los indios” end with the verbal image of a revolution that will mend the severed bond between human and nonhuman life: “Sangre y fusil y la tierra, / Gritando revolución, / Ya van bajando los pueblos / Hacia la liberación” (Blood and rifle and earth / Shouting ‘Revolution’ / The peoples [of America] are moving down toward liberation).69 Valdez’s lyric draws upon the anticolonial rhetoric of nineteenth-century Latin America. It also shows the influence of the Third World solidarity movement. There is a naïve romanticism in the song’s handling of the indigenous, but it does show an admirable desire to join the Chicano movement with the historical struggle against the social and ecological destructiveness of unrestrained capitalism in the Western Hemisphere. These works by Gonzales and Valdez were two of the many attempts during the 1960s and 1970s to rethink the relationship between nature and society through creative expression. The visual arts, though, is where we find some of the most compelling examples of a nascent environmentalist aesthetic in the Chicano movement. There is good reason why. In a society dominated by the image, the visual arts capture and keep viewer attention better than most other forms of expression. Also, the visual arts directly address the optic dimension of ecological devastation. Because the production of commodities so frequently relies on the exploitation of laborers and on the exhaustion of natural resources, modern economies obscure the conditions in which goods are made. The visual arts are powerful precisely because they get viewers to see aspects of the world that otherwise go unseen. Chicano/a artists have consistently used this

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power to focus viewer attention on the hidden costs of capitalism, and also to envision healthier models of human interaction with the natural worlds of which they are a part. There are two different—though at times overlapping—strands within the tradition of Chicano/a environmentalist art. The confrontational approach challenges a pervasive vision of postwar abundance by confronting viewers with stark images of the social and ecological destructiveness of American consumerism. Ester Hernandez’s iconoclastic image Sun Mad (1982) is among the best examples of this style. Born and raised in central California, Hernandez worked in the fields alongside her farmworker parents when she was a child. As a teenager, she got involved in the UFW strike and began a lifelong career in progressive Chicano/a politics and art. Her Sun Mad image is a stinging parody of the famous red-bonneted woman who appears on packaging for the Sun-Maid Growers of California. Hernandez uses the bold red, yellow, and white palette of the original, but she replaces the face of the original model, Lorraine Collet Peterson, with a skeleton dressed in the same long braid and scarlet hat. Beneath a basket of yellowed grapes and the distinctive block lettering of the pun “Sun Mad Raisins” is the phrase “Unnaturally Grown with Insecticides, Miticides, Herbicides, and Fungicides.” The image is jarring. The happy feeling of recognition that comes with seeing a childhood brand is quickly replaced by an unsettling confusion. Hernandez’s parody forces viewers to think about the relationship between the pleasant pastoral imagery of food marketing and the ugly realities of agricultural production. Not all viewers who see Sun Mad will change their opinion about farm labor or about agrochemicals. But it is impossible to ever look at the original in quite the same way. The second strand of environmentalist Chicano/a art was an affirmative approach that looked to Mexican American histories and cultures as sources of inspiration for more sustainable and more just lifeways. Hernandez’s Mis Madres (1986) typifies this approach. The screenprint shows a satellite image of Earth in the left palm of an indigenous elderwoman who looks directly at the viewer. In putting these two “mothers” together, Hernandez critiques the widespread perception of native peoples as premodern and passive. Daniel Desiga’s 1976 Campesino is another example. This oil-on-canvas image depicts a male farmworker bent forward at the waist, his face hidden beneath a wide-brim hat, his hands working a row of crops with the hated short-handle hoe. Growers see farmworkers as barely more than a tool in the agricultural assembly

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line, but Desiga’s work emphasizes the man’s humanity. Blood courses through the veins of the campesino’s powerful forearms; his golden sunlike shirt radiates warmth against a cool blue backdrop; and the small tattoos between each thumb and pointer finger hint at a life beyond the fields. Sky, soil, and humanity unite visually, showing the worker’s right and responsibility to the land. The image critiques what intellectual historian C. B. Macpherson calls “possessive individualism,” a doctrine of capitalist modernity that equates personhood with property rights.70 Campesino endorses instead a model of personhood in which the dignity of the individual comes from human creativity and community, the latter made manifest in the spectator’s recognition of the farmworker. As in Yo soy Joaquín, there is a measure of romance inherent in Desiga’s imagining. But this romance served as a counterpoint to the agriculture industry’s denigration of the farmworker, and also as a corrective to the zero population growth movement’s consistent representation of the migrant as a pollutant. Movement artists turned to indigenous themes in creating an environmentalist art as part of the sweeping reappraisal during the 1960s and 1970s of the relationship between Chicanos/as and Native Americans. Under Spanish and Mexican rule of what is today the American Southwest, Indians were conquered and forced into servitude by ranchers, miners, soldiers, and clergy. They occupied the lowest rungs of a racial hierarchy made apparent in the seventeeth-century Spanish casta paintings, which taxonomized an array of skin colors according to caste.71 In the early twentieth century, José Vasconcelos and other Mexican intellectual elites attempted to remake the indio into a symbol of cultural independence from Europe, but their efforts were not aimed at improving the lives of the nation’s native peoples. Chicano/a activists wanted more substantive alliances with Native Americans. They publicly supported the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1970, and American Indian activists in turn endorsed the UFW’s boycott of grocery giant Safeway. In 1971, Indian and Chicano/a leaders fought governmental resistance to establish Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University (DQU) in Davis, California. DQU won accreditation in 1977, and it served as California’s only tribal college until its closure in 2005.72 The most dramatic story line involving these two groups happened in the events surrounding the June 26, 1975, federal siege in South Dakota. While living in Seattle in the early 1970s, Lakota activist Leonard Peltier found support among Mexican Americans in the local struggle to restore Indian control of Fort Lawton. When Peltier and his colleagues were forced into hiding

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following the deaths of Agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler during the raid on the American Indian encampment at Wounded Knee, they were given shelter in Colorado by members of the Crusade for Justice. Peltier, sometimes mistaken for a Chicano when his hair was short, was later aided in his escape from Lompoc Prison by Bobby Garcia, a Chicano from New Mexico. Peltier had feared that prison authorities were planning to kill him.73 María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo argues that the Chicano/a indigenism of the Chicano movement ignored the complexity of contemporary native politics. She also contends that indigenism ironically condemned Indians to a vanishing past.74 She is right to emphasize the risks of cultural borrowing, but Mexican American activists were generally aware of these risks, and they took steps to avoid stereotype and condescension. Enriqueta Vasquez once believed that Aztlán deserved recognition as a sovereign Chicano/a nation. In an October 1969 editorial, she wrote: “We, the Raza, must wake up to Aztlán. We must know that as Aztlán we seek freedom—culturally, socially, economically and politically. That is our goal, we must live it, we must awaken.”75 Only one month later, Vasquez traveled to San Francisco to show her solidarity with the American Indian activists who had taken control of Alcatraz Island. She left California with a greater appreciation for prior indigenous claims to the land. As historian Lorena Oropeza says of Vasquez: “Native American activists at the gathering ‘felt threatened’ by talk of Aztlán and ‘had a hard time grasping’ [the concept]. . . . [Vasquez] rejected the idea that Mexican Americans should seek sole physical possession of any part of the present-day U.S. Southwest in favor of the idea that Chicanos and Chicanas needed to nurture their sense of cultural and spiritual belonging to the land.”76 Vasquez’s respect for native sovereignty was widespread among Mexican American activists. Visual artists played a particularly important role in exploring the possibilities and the limits of indigenous themes in progressive Chicano/a politics. Santa Barraza, Emanuel Martinez, Juana Alicia, Daniel Desiga, Yolanda Lopez, Enrique Chagoya, Judy Baca, and Carmen Lomas Garza (to name only a few) made extensive use of native imagery to challenge the Eurocentrism of the art world and also to envision other modes of relating to humanity and to the larger natural world. These artists worked across a range of visual media, but most famous are the indigenous murals that were created on public spaces throughout the United States, and especially in the Southwest. San Diego’s Chicano Park, for example, was created in the 1970s by the community leaders

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of Barrio Logan after a protracted permit struggle with city and state officials. The pillars of the Coronado Bridge above the park were painted with a range of indigenous motifs, including the sacred heart, Aztec and Mayan deities, and the ollin, a symbol of movement. The gender politics surrounding the use of indigenous motifs in Chicano/a mural art is complex: some murals presented viewers with a narrowly male-oriented and heterosexual image of the past, while others offered a more egalitarian vision. These contradictions around sexuality and gender in public art are evidence of the fact that efforts to imagine a Chicano/a environmentalism were always bound up with debates about family, economy, and custom. Chicana artist Santa Barraza’s portfolio deserves special attention, as hers is an especially compelling example of how Chicano/a visual arts rethink the relationship between humans and the ecologies to which they belong. Barraza was born on April 7, 1951, in Kingsville, a South Texas town whose economy is dominated by the famous—and for many Mexicans, infamous—King Ranch. Barraza came from a workingclass family. Her grandparents were sharecroppers and railroad hands, and her parents, Frances and Joaquín, owned a small car repair shop. Barraza took art classes from an admired teacher at H. M. King High School, where she served as art editor for the school’s literary magazine. After enrolling at Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M–Kingsville), she decided to make the visual arts her vocation. During her freshman year, a professor introduced her to pre-Colombian art and to the work of the Mexican muralists. Inspired, Barraza transferred to the University of Texas at Austin to get her BFA and MFA degrees. While there, she enrolled in Jacinto Quirarte’s Chicano/a art history class and was introduced to his groundbreaking Mexican-American Art in manuscript form. She joined Los Quemados (The Burnt-Out), a radical art collective that included Carmen Lomas Garza, César Martínez, and Jose Treviño, and later she cofounded a feminist art collective called Mujeres Artistas del Suroeste (Women Artists of the Southwest, or MAS). Barraza left Texas in 1985, first to Pennsylvania for teaching positions at La Roche College and Penn State, and then in 1993 to the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1997, Barraza returned to Kingsville, where she teaches studio art to new generations of working-class students at her hometown university. As with all great artists, Barraza’s work has evolved over the past several decades. Her artistic vision, though, remains rooted in the cultural and political values she developed during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1969, Barraza got involved in progressive activism on the Texas A&I

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campus. Pedro Rodriguez had recently been hired as the university’s first Chicano/a art professor, and many students—including the accomplished artists Amado Peña and José Rivera—were challenging artistic conventions and exploring their cultural heritage. José Angel Gutiérrez was then a graduate student in political science at Kingsville, and he joined with Carlos Guerra and others to form a local chapter of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO).77 MAYO was one of the movement’s most visible and, arguably, most successful organizations. It formed in 1967 out of a barroom study group led by Mario Compean, Willie Velásquez, Juan Patlán, Ignacio Pérez, and Gutiérrez. Seemingly overnight, it transformed into an energetic movement-within-a-movement, eventually becoming the organizational backbone of La Raza Unida, the Chicano/a third-party campaign. Barraza joined MAYO. Though hers was not an especially political family, she had grown up with whispered stories of ancestors robbed of their land and driven into poverty by corrupt Anglos. MAYO’s message of self-determination and cultural pride resonated with her. Barraza was from a borderlands region rich with Mexican American history, but she and her school-age peers knew little of it because it had been erased by decades of colonial revisionism. She recovered some of this heritage in college, using her art as a way of making it her own. Her 1973 pencil drawing Soldaderas shows three women soldiers standing beside Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary whose battle cry “Tierra y Libertad” (land and liberty) was frequently quoted by Chicano/a activists. As Edward J. McCaughan notes, allusions to the art and politics of the Mexican Revolution were a key strategy for challenging the disempowering ideals of assimilationism that dominated U.S. culture.78 Barraza’s vivid interpretation of this wartime scene meditates on the many unseen roles that women play in political struggles, and on their unseen sacrifices. The pencil drawing Los Migrantes, also from 1972, reproduces a close-up portrait by WPA photographer Russell Lee of a weary but proud migrant man and his young child. These two images differ notably in their execution. The play on light and dark is more intense in Los Migrantes, while Soldaderas is more exact in its lines. Both images, though, manage to reconstruct a transnational and cross-ethnic political genealogy for Chicano/a activism at a time when Mexican American history was hidden. The late Shifra Goldman describes Barraza’s work from the late 1960s and the early 1970s as the first of three phases in the artist’s career. At the time, Barraza was completing her bachelor’s degree, working as a

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figure 2.1. Los Migrantes (1972) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of Texas A&M University Press.

graphic designer, and raising her young daughter Andrea. Goldman says the artwork of this first period “finds its best voice in tonality and drama, in the powerful use of black and white with forceful and diagonal composition, in the limitation of subject to one or several figures delineated on the plain surface.”79 The works have an experimental feeling to them. Barraza was clearly focused on technique: perfecting her use of shading, controlling line, and developing a sense of scale. She also was trying out different subjects. Images such as Los Migrantes focused explicitly on history and politics. Others dwelt on familial and individual concerns. Regrettably, very little of this early work is available today. According to Barraza, it was stolen from her in the early 1980s by a prominent scholar and art collector. Goldman calls Barraza’s second period, which lasted through the 1980s, a more “introspective” period, with a “general ‘loosening’ of form, a greater expressionist tendency, and a more open application of color.”80 It is tempting to describe this shift in Barraza’s style as a movement away from the political commitments of earlier decades. While this narrative aligns with the common misperception of the 1980s as a time of retreat among progressive artists and activists, it does not do justice to the complex evolution of Barraza’s portfolio. Nor does it explain what happened

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to Chicano/a culture and politics at a time of conservative ascendancy. Barraza’s said in a 1983 statement: “My artwork has been influenced by the Chicano movement of the late sixties and early seventies, my culture, historical background, the modern Mexican muralists, and shamanism. At the beginning of my creative endeavor, I created art about my physical experiences and struggle for my raza (people). Today I utilize images from the unconscious, working intrinsically to convey a personal, indiscernible, and emotional experience.”81 This shift toward the personal does not signal apathy or narcissism, as commentators such as Armando Navarro have suggested. What it does signal is a tactical shift. In the early part of the 1970s, progressive Chicano/a art was dominated by public art, especially posters and murals. Women found it difficult to break into this world, as it required a highly specialized technique, physical capacities for which few women had been trained, and a willingness to endure harrassment from passersby.82 Artists such as Judy Baca pursued public art anyway, but they met considerable resistance. Feminist organizing throughout the 1970s created new opportunities for women artists in Latino/a galleries, in feminist and local galleries, and at colleges and universities. Goldman notes that these venues fostered work that was more intimate in scale and theme. The art, though, was no less political in its vision.83 As Barraza eloquently says of her entire career: “My artwork is about resistance, de-colonization, self-definition, self-empowerment, and survival.”84 She has been successful because she has allowed her art to evolve, even as she remains committed to the principles of equality and freedom that guided Chicano/a activism during the 1960s and 1970s. The key to understanding the arc of Santa Barraza’s career is the great feminist saying that “the personal is political” because for her, the border between public and private is a porous one. When she was a child, Barraza was influenced by her mother’s strength and intellect, and also by stories of survival among the women of earlier generations in her family. These influences recur in her work, as do the influences of feminist art. During the late 1970s, Barraza saw Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking installation Dinner Table. The place settings that Chicago reserved at her enormous meal for the neglected women of literary and art history allowed Barraza to claim a tradition for herself at a time when most female artists struggled to get recognition from gallery owners, mentors, critics, museums, and peers. African American portraitist Lorna Simpson helped Barraza develop a “subversive” visual style that empowered viewers—especially women of color—to respect their bodies and to see themselves as participants in a proud history of survival.85 Frida Kahlo was another important

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inspiration. In college, Barraza had studied the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros, incorporating their keen historical imagination and their intense color schemes into her work. It was Kahlo, though, who most influenced Barraza’s use of the human figure as a vehicle for expressing complex themes of history, memory, mortality, beauty, and nature. Images such as Yo como Canuta (1982) show the influence of Kahlo on Barraza’s style, while also testifying to the border-crossing impulse of Chicana and Mexican feminist art. When Barraza encountered her work in the 1970s, Kahlo was relatively unknown in the United States. The 1979 exhibition Homenaje a Frida Kahlo/Homage to Frida Kahlo—which had been organized by Barraza’s friend and fellow Kingsville native Carmen Lomas Garza—helped popularize the life and art of the celebrated Mexican painter. Barraza’s Renacimiento/Rebirth (1980) illustrates the cultural politics at work in her evolution as an artist. Done on paper, the 55" x 59" pastel image shows at center a woman in her twenties or thirties crouched in prayer to the left of a steel crib. She is dressed casually, wearing slipon shoes, blue jeans, and a plaid, untucked collared shirt. Inside the crib—where a mattress and child should be—are a rose-colored cross of the Christian religion and a deep-green maguey plant of indigenous Nahuatl belief. In the foreground, buried in the earth beneath the crib, lies an infant whose umbilical cord connects it with the plant above it. The copper-skinned bust of the Virgin of Guadalupe hovers in the background, and behind her, tall grasses seem to blow against a strip of blueand-red night sky. Shades of green tie these different elements together to form an image that feels somber and yet hopeful, questioning but quietly resolute. The critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto notes that the image is Barraza’s “first image of the Guadalupana and the first piece ‘getting back into color’ after a prolonged period of experimentation with a strictly black-and-white palette.” He calls Renacimiento/Rebirth “a tour de force, a multilayered visual interpretation of cultural syncretism.”86 Ybarra-Frausto’s use of the word “syncretism” is apt. Like many Chicano/a artists and thinkers of the past several decades, Barraza blends Christian and indigenous symbols as a critique of Eurocentric narratives of world history. Renacimiento/Rebirth is also remarkable in that it combines feminist and environmentalist ethics to confront models of femininity that revolve around consumerism and passivity. Feminist commentators have noted that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the processes of industrialization in western Europe and North America caused a hardening of gender roles. Men

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figure 2.2. Renacimiento/Rebirth (1980) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of Texas A&M University Press.

were increasingly socialized as the force behind mass-produced factory goods. Women, in turn, became consumers. Their job—in principle, if not always in fact—was to purchase commodities in a rapidly growing marketplace, and to provide emotional, sexual, and physical support to the laboring man. Issues of gender and sexuality became tangled up with ecology in new and difficult ways. The needs of the permanent-growth economy led to the commodification and exploitation of natural ecosystems, often gendered as female (for example, “Mother Earth”). Women were likewise subordinated to the production process, first as sexual commodities, and second as engines of consumer demand. The masculininst notion of dominion over nature ran parallel to the notion of dominion over women. Renacimiento/Rebirth draws a radically different picture of womanhood. It also gives viewers an alternative imagining of the relationship between people and the broader natural world. The woman we see in the

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middle ground of the image is engaged in traditionally feminine activities. She prays and keeps watch over the body of her child. The small white cross inside the crib establishes a parallel between the grieving mother on the left and the dark-skinned mother of Christ in the background, transforming the image into a kind of Pietà. The maguey cactus and the cross point to themes of death and of regeneration. Native to southern Texas and northern Mexico, the maguey was revered by the Aztecs. According to Barraza, the plant symbolizes the tribe’s “mythicoreligious concept of the central force of life and death.”87 Her allusion to Christian and indigenous tradition positions women as makers and sustainers of life, and also as guardians of human memory. Renacimiento/ Rebirth serves as a powerful counterpoint to the unserious images of girlhood and womanhood that dominate the contemporary visual landscape. To her credit, Barraza does not indulge in the melodrama of femininity as self-sacrifice, for while there is tragedy in this image, it exists alongside a formidable will to survive. Nor does Barraza make her subject a slave to tradition. The woman’s modern clothing confirms Ybarra-Frausto’s observation that for Barraza, “renacimiento is a process that embraces both tradition and change.”88 The effort in this work to challenge consumer-oriented and masculinist ideas of womanhood is coupled with a reimagining of how humans inhabit their natural environments. Patriarchal societies are built upon a libidinal economy that encourages sexual desire in men and punishes sexual desire in women. Women are thus made available to men in a way that men are not available to women. Within modern industrialized societies, nonhuman nature is similarly perceived as available for exploitation. Mountains, wilderness, deserts, and mysterious oceans are often romanticized, even fetishized, but always within a worldview that places people at a remove from the natural world “out there.” Renacimiento/Rebirth envisions humans as part of nature. The umbilical cord joining the infant child and the maguey plant serves as a metaphor of human agency within the ecosystems we occupy. In return, “the earth is shown as both womb (engendering vegetation) and tomb.”89 The cross, the maguey plant, and the skull necklace worn by la Virgen testify to the unique power of the human imagination. For Barraza, though, this power is not a license for exploitation. She suggests instead the need to use human creativity as the basis of an ethic of care. The maguey cactus at the center of the image thus represents for her an idealized “symbol of the incarnation of the forces of nature and humanity.”90

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Barraza’s fascination with indigenous cultures past and present has expanded since the 1980s, as has her commitment to a feminist-inflected Chicano/a environmentalism. In 1990, Barraza traveled to Mexico City and immersed herself in religious iconography and colonial history. In 1993, she lived for three months in Oaxaca, where she set up a private studio and interacted with local artists.91 Barraza was already familiar with Mexican art and history. She had studied these areas in college and in graduate school, and after her formal training, she and other members of the MAS collective had organized the 1979 Conferencia Plástica Chicana, a groundbreaking art conference in Austin that brought Mexican artists and art historians together with emerging Chicano/a cultural producers. Her pilgrimages to Mexico, though, transformed her. She did more adaptions of the retablo, a Christian devotional genre that included the exvoto, a visual record of a miraculous event, and the santo, a depiction of a holy person.92 Barraza had explored Christian themes and imagery since her early days as an artist, but her time in Mexico gave those explorations renewed intensity. It also expanded her interest in indigenous themes and inspired feminist revisions of Aztec, Mayan, Mixtec, and Zapotec mythologies. Oaxaca has been a center of indigenous rights activism in Mexico. According to Edward J. McCaughan, this political and cultural tradition has energized the Left in Mexico and challenged the nation’s entrenched racism.93 Barraza’s travels had a dramatic impact on her style. Her lines became much sharper than in earlier periods. Goldman writes that “by the 1990s, control . . . was maintained through tighter drawing, more finished edges and surfaces, and the use of repeated decorative patterns in geometric arrangements.”94 Perspective in her images became more two-dimensional, evidence of the influence of the retablo tradition and, even more, of the codices used by native peoples to record their history and culture. Barraza increasingly used oils, enamels, and acrylics, and she began to choose colors associated with aspects of hemispheric history, including earthen hues borrowed from Mayan texts, and yellows, blues, and reds drawn from “mestizo style” architecture in the city of Puebla.95 The enormous visual power of Barraza’s images from the last two decades comes in large part from their combination of bright color, sharp line, and extraordinary imagery. The oil-and-enamel painting Retablo of Mestizaje Codex (1991) illustrates the complex interplay of ecology, politics, and aesthetics in Barraza’s portfolio. The top-left quadrant of the image shows a woman cradling an infant in her arms. The woman is wrapped in a red shawl and wearing her black hair pulled back, and her lower body is obscured by

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figure 2.3. Retablo of Mestizaje Codex (1991) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the artist.

a maguey plant with olive-green and blood-red leaves. A snake crawls along the ground behind her. The night sky at her back contains stars and pictures related to indigenous history and myth: a shell and a rabbit, both symbols of female fertility; a cross in front of a double-headed horse and rider, alluding to the conquest; a bird; a yellow sunburst referencing “the eye of god”; a bow-like ollin, symbol of the energy immanent in the universe; and the outline of a deity. Ten pairs of blue-and-yellow boxes comprise the rest of the painting, arranged in an “L” shape around the woman, each one containing symbols from indigenous codices. As in Renacimiento/Rebirth, the image is dominated by the maguey, which visually births the mother and child and protects them. In Aztec society, the maguey plant was the site of ritual sacrifice. Blood spilled by the victims was perceived as an offering to Huitzilopochtli, the sun-war god who guarded the Aztecs and gave them life.96 The red on each leaf

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references death and the green life, making the plant an allegory of the biological cycles that are inherent in nature. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto says that the maguey is “an ancient symbol of regeneration” that is “related to the notion of sustainability.”97 It is jarring to see a historic instrument of cruelty associated with life and survival. Barraza, though, is aware of the contradictions implicit in her appropriation of indigenous history. By bringing Aztec iconography into the modern space of studio and gallery, she honors her mestiza past on her own terms. She also prompts viewers to ask questions about their own relationship to nature, time, and community. Renacimiento/Rebirth and Retablo of Mestizaje Codex are alike in that they see mothering and motherhood as a potential source of empowerment for women. But while 1970s-era cultural feminism and its emphasis on the reproductive power of the female body remains an important intellectual touchstone for Barraza, her vision of progressive feminist politics is not reductively biological. The mixed-media image Coatlicue (1986) shows this expansiveness. Mexican anthropologist Miguel LeónPortilla’s Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind (1963) was an influential text in the Chicano movement. According to León-Portilla, Coatlicue was the earthen deity of Nahuatl religion, the “embodiment in stone of the ideas of a supreme cosmic being who generates and sustains the universe.”98 Barraza’s piece has at center a reproduction of the deity’s stone statue at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. In the foreground of the image is a maguey plant, and above the deity’s head is a traditional rendering of the Catholic virgin. Barraza notes in her commentary on this image that the deity “wears a skirt of woven rattlesnakes and a collar of sacrificed hearts and hands. Androgynous in character, she has breasts and a penis, the latter represented by a serpent between her legs. . . . Duality is embodied in her.”99 In Coatlicue, Barraza refuses the strict division of labor that puts women in charge of the home and men in charge of work and government. The ability to create and sustain human life is one source of women’s power in Barraza’s imagination, but so is the ability to create art in the public sphere. Coatlicue also embraces sexual diversity as a central part of progressive Chicano/a politics. Her image is a counter to the stubbornly heteronormative iconography that Richard T. Rodríguez deconstructs in his commentary on movement film, murals, and street publications.100 Emma Tenayuca Codex is another illustration of Barraza’s expansive environmental aesthetic. Completed in 1993, the acrylic features a portrait of one of the major figures of Mexican American history. Emma

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figure 2.4. Emma Tenayuca Codex (1993) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the artist.

Tenayuca (whom I discuss again in chapter 4) was born in 1916 to migrant parents and was raised in San Antonio’s working-class westside barrio. A precocious girl who loved reading, she was influenced by such authors as Émile Zola, Charles Darwin, and Charles Beard. She also drew inspiration from her grandfather’s progressive politics, and from the political energies that circulated in Milam Park, a historically vital Chicano/a public sphere. In 1936, as part of what Alicia Camacho Schmidt calls a “transborder social movement,” Emma Tenayuca and her colleague María Solís Sager traveled to Mexico City for union training from the

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Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (Mexican Worker’s Confederation).101 She joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in 1937, and in 1938 she led approximately seven thousand workers in a strike against sweatshop conditions in San Antonio’s pecan-shelling industry. Tenayuca was hated by city leaders but beloved by workers, who admired her considerable powers of public speaking and her courage in the face of police violence. Success in San Antonio helped make Tenayuca an important part of the multiethnic Popular Front movement. In 1937, she collaborated with Harlem activist Frances Duty as members of the National Executive Committee of the Workers’ Alliance. In 1938, she ran for Congress with the Texas Communist Party, sharing a ticket with the Anglo gubernatorial candidate (and her husband) Homer Brooks, and African American candidate Cecil B. Robinet for lieutenant governor. Stalin’s signing of the 1939 Soviet-German Nonagression Pact led to Tenayuca’s resignation from the Communist Party in 1946, but she remained committed to progressive politics throughout her life.102 Tenayuca has been a consistent source of inspiration for Chicano/a artists and activists. Américo Paredes used her as the model for the character “Chonita” in his short story “The Hammon and the Beans,” written in the 1930s and published by Arte Público Press in 1994.103 Barraza’s Emma Tenayuca Codex likewise pays artistic tribute to this underappreciated figure in American labor history. A bust of the smiling Tenayuca is positioned in the foreground of the image in three-quarter profile. She wears a bright-yellow blouse with prints of the ollin symbol, and she is cradled by the red-and-green leaves of the maguey. Beneath the maguey is an ornamental pink strip with blue diamonds that echoes the visual style of the Nahuatl codices. The night sky above Tenuyuca’s head glows bright from the moon, giving the earth around her a mesmerizing turquoise cast. In the distance, a thin horizontal line of mountains divides the canvas into the 5:8 to 3:8 “golden section” idealized by Renaissance artists as “a divine proportion with mystical properties.”104 The top-left quadrant has the painting’s most surprising element. A waxing crescent moon the same color as Tenayuca’s shirt is suspended in midair behind the labor leader. Seated on it, eyes closed in seeming meditation, is a youthful representation of the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui. Like Coatlicue, Emma Tenayuca Codex adapts native iconography to give viewers an expanded vision of sex and gender roles within Mexican American communities. In traditional Nahuatl mythology, the animal Coyolxauhqui holds in her arms represents biological reproduction. Barraza, though, composes the image in a way that emphasizes other

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forms of female creativity. She emphasizes Tenayuca’s leadership skills by painting her in a scale and a pose that recalls the time-honored busts of history’s “Great Men.” The ollin symbol on the activist’s shirt emphasizes her energy and magnetism, while also highlighting the blend of tradition and innovation at work in the Chicano movement. Women’s lives are typically narrated through their domestic relations. Emma Tenayuca Codex stresses that Tenayuca’s significance to Chicano/a history comes not from her private life as wife, mother, or daughter, but rather from her public role as organizer, author, speaker, and educator. In 1995, Barraza spent five intense weeks producing art at California’s Villa Montalvo retreat with Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson, Mexican artist Cristina Luna, Chiapan playwright Isabel Juárez Espinosa, and Chicana writer and artist Gloria Anzaldúa. The workshop was called “Entre Americas: El Taller Nepantla.” While there, Anzaldúa cast the Aztec legend of Coyolxuahqui’s death at the hands of her war-god brother Huitzilopochtli as an allegory of artistic mestizaje (mixture), a process by which the artist transforms the violence of the past into “a new state of consciousness” where traditions can be “re-interpreted and re-membered.” Emma Tenayuca Codex had been painted two years earlier, but Anzaldúa’s commentary gave Barraza a new lens for thinking about her work. She used the image to call viewer attention to the political and artistic contributions that women have made throughout Chicano/a history. The artistic and political dimensions of the piece are rooted in the social and geographic particularities of the Texas landscape that Tenayuca (like Barraza) called home. Not everyone appreciates the desert ecology visible in Emma Tenayuca Codex. Its combination of high temperatures, low water supply, and austere and sometimes threatening flora and fauna make it an unappealing place to many people, especially when juxtaposed with the alpine geographies of mountain, forest, and stream that are traditionally romanticized by environmentalists. Barraza’s painting is an invitation for viewers to see the beauty of this landscape, which for her includes the beauty of its human inhabitants. The image has several elements: Tenayuca in the foreground, Coyolxuahqui with moon and cacti in the middle ground, and sky and mountains in the background. These elements are united visually by Barraza’s distinctive approach to depth and perspective. Shifra Goldman refers to the “pseudonaïve style” of Barraza’s third period as “one in which the composition primarily features frontal figures within a flattened landscape, rendered in unmodulated horizontal planes of brilliant color.” She compares it

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to “the paintings of Gauguin, but with a much different color scheme,” and notes that “depth is suggested only by Renaissance-like scale and overlap.”105 Goldman is somewhat critical of this style, but the flattening serves a specific political and environmental purpose. Emma Tenayuca Codex aims to represent what the Nahua called the tonal, or spirit, of a place.106 For Barraza, this means not only the physical attributes of a particular landscape, but also the symbiotic relationship between and among living and nonliving things. The two-dimensionality of Barraza’s canvasses represents a sophisticated critique of the ideological framework that surrounds European high art. The roots of this framework are in ancient Greece, where the “morally puritanical” philosophy of the fifth century BCE produced an aesthetic based on the “overt recognition of a close and desirable connection between visual appearances and images.107 During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the “discovery” of this classical style by the tastemakers of early modern Europe led to a dramatic shift in style. The twodimensional look of Byzantine devotional art was replaced by a painterly naturalism108 that emphasized the physical world. Increasingly, the aim of the artist was to re-create nature through the use of three-dimensional perspective, mathematical scaling, precise lines, dramatic shading, and sophisticated coloration, with a premium placed on the ability to reproduce the human form through detailed musculature and expressive countenances. Impressionism, symbolism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, and other modern movements have challenged the Renaissance ideal of verisimilitude, but for most audiences, the ability to create images that mirror nature remains the mark of artistic genius. The skillfulness and beauty of paintings by David, Michaelangelo, Titian, Holbein, and other famous names in this tradition is undeniable. The ideological legacy of European high art is less admirable, though. Naturalist images position themselves to viewers as unmediated depictions of a particular place and time, but the act of representing nature— and, simultaneously, the place of humans in nature—is always embedded in a larger constellation of social, political, and, material realities. Art historian John Berger argues that the oil-painting tradition is inseparable from the principles and practices of capitalism, which emerged at roughly the same moment in history. Still lifes of sumptuous objects, seductive renderings of nude women, elegant self-portraits, and stunning landscapes were hung on the walls of the wealthy, flattering them with vivid reminders of all they did—or could—possess. Oil was the perfect medium for this cultural work because it has a “special ability to render

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the tangibility, the texture, the luster, the solidity of what it depicts.” Art “celebrated a new kind of wealth—which was dynamic and which found its sanction in the supreme buying power of money.”109 Of course, contemporary viewers rarely look at paintings from the perspective of an aristocrat surveying his fortune. They approach paintings more often as secular pilgrims in the museum, where paintings are displayed with a hushed reverence elsewhere reserved for the sacred. Government funding, corporate sponsorship, and private donors have made art accessible to the masses, stripping the art industry of some of its elitism. Yet the perspective of the aristocrat is still implied in the way we are trained to look at the world beyond ourselves. Whether rich or poor, male or female, white or nonwhite, the visual culture of capitalism encourages us to look at all of nature as something that can be bought or sold. As Berger pointedly puts it: “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.”110 Like all modern artists, Barraza has been influenced by the oil painting tradition. As Goldman observes, Barraza occasionally uses “Renaissance-like scale and overlap” to introduce a limited sense of depth. In Retablo of Mestizaje Codex, the body of the mother has no volume, but because the woman is painted on top of the snake, there is some dimensionality. The effect is a subtle trick of the eye: if you look quickly at the image it seems one-dimensional, but if you focus for a moment on the top-left quadrant, it starts to look three-dimensional. The Renaissance tradition also influences Barraza’s sophisticated use of light and dark. In Emma Tenayuca Codex, the labor leader’s face is lit from the front and right, bestowing on her a saintly quality that subtly recalls the works of Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Barraza’s appropriation of European high art exemplifies the inventiveness of Chicano/a art, which frequently uses dominant traditions to challenge dominant ideologies. The more significant influences on her art, though, are the retablo and the codex, two genres deeply rooted in the history and politics of the Americas. For Barraza, the retablo tradition represents a decolonizing “mestizo style” of art.111 Religious leaders from Spain brought the medium to the “New World” during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the hope of expanding Catholicism at a time when Protestants were attacking its authority. The retablo gradually became a syncretic folk art that combined European, indigenous, and African elements. Barraza values this tradition for its artistic mestizaje, or mixture. For example, her painting Black Madonna shows a beautiful

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coffee-colored woman standing against the backdrop of a modern city skyline. Here the retablo form expands viewer sensitivity to the diversity of Chicano/a communities. The black Madonna—a prominent religious icon in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos/as—is descended from Isis, the African goddess.112 By painting this figure in the indigenous clothing and symbols of the Americas, Barraza offers a gesture of solidarity with black freedom struggles around the globe, and references the overlooked history of African Americans in Aztlán, including the fugitive slaves who sometimes found refuge in Mexican American homes as they fled south across the border. This is one reason the retablo is important to Barraza. It is also important because its affirmation of the sacred in everyday life offers a view of history from below. European high art typically aims for monumentality in its scale and execution. Its preferred subjects are world-changing figures, nobility, sublime landscapes, or major historical moments. The retablos, though, and the ex-votos in particular, are modest in their design. Usually they are painted by amateurs on a two-dimensional plane divided into two regions: a pictoral area depicts the wondrous event, and a smaller text area tells the story of what happened.113 For the marginalized subjects who create them, the images serve as repositories of feeling, and also as testimonies of survival in a difficult world. Barraza notes that the look of the ex-voto was strongly influenced by the codex, a native form that is central to her environmentalist aesthetic. The codices were sacred manuscripts that recorded the myths and iconography of indigenous religions throughout Mexico and Central America. In Nahuatl society, they were produced by tlacuilos, or scribes, who painted on the folded bark of a wild fig tree called the amate.114 Fearful and contemptuous of native traditions, early Spanish colonizers set the documents on fire in what must have been a dramatic and traumatizing moment of humiliation for the indigenous witnesses. Fortunately, a handful survived. By the 1540s, only two decades after Hernan Cortés’s capture of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, a new wave of religious colonizers had grown frustrated with the slow pace of Christianization. Members of the priestly class began interviewing the dwindling number of tribal elders who had survived the conquest in the hopes of better understanding—and eradicating—indigenous beliefs. These chronicles, assembled by such figures as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, form the foundation of modern knowledge about pre-Colombian societies, including the form and function of the codices. Both the retablo and the codex are painted in a “naïve style” with “flat planes and shallow space.” They are characterized by their “bold design,”

figure 2.5. Black Madonna (1991–92) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the artist.

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their intense coloration, and their “unencumbered” backgrounds.115 The influence of these hemispheric American genres on Barraza’s portfolio is particularly noticeable in the artist’s third phrase. Like the retablo and the codex, her work has crisp lines, two-dimensional perspective, and a kind of weightlessness.116 Barraza’s stylistic choices represent a sophisticated visual argument about the relationship between humanity and nature, one that is consistent with the principles of the Chicano/a environmentalism that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. The naturalism of the oil tradition rests ironically on a rigid ideological divide between humanity and nature. Its dramatic use of chiaroscuro (light and dark) gave density to the human form. This technique, along with a highly refined use of three-dimensional perspective and a careful attention to anatomy, extracted human subjects from their ecology and rendered nature a lifeless background. The ideological effect was a reinforcing of capitalism’s market-driven individualism and the propagation of the idea that nature was a mere commodity to be exploited, rather than a resource to be shared. This is not to say that the distinction between the human and nonhuman was entirely the product of oil painting, or even that it first appeared during the early modern period. The idea that human beings are at a remove from nature is found (among other places) in the Bible, which includes the divine command that humans “fill the earth and have dominion . . . over every living thing.” However, the oil painting tradition sharpened this false distinction between humanity and nature at a crucial crossroads in world history. By doing so, it participated in the emergence of a global market system in which everything becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold. The fact that modern advertising is premised on the oil painting tradition only serves to reinforce and expand this ideology.117 A different kind of naturalism operates in Barraza’s work. Her art shows a rich awareness of what makes humans unique: the sophisticated use of symbols and signs; the capacity for self-reflection through art and reason; and a deliberative approach to organizing social life, among other things. For Barraza, though, these aspects of human existence— like humans themselves—do not exist apart from nature. She anchors her belief in indigenous philosophy, saying that “respect for the earth and maintaining a balance between the physical and the spiritual worlds were the bases of the religious and philosophical world views of our indigenous ancestors.”118 Barraza’s strategic use of dimension affirms this balance. Her canvases draw on the principles of European high art to create a feeling of dynamism, but the shallow field of vision emphasizes

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a proximate relationship between the human subject and her surroundings. The result is what artist and commentator Amalia Mesa-Bains calls “an instructive gaze” found in the work of many Chicana artists.119 Barraza’s images invite viewers to pause from the hurried pace of life in late capitalism, to reflect on what they value most, and to consider how those values connect them to the human and nonhuman worlds they inhabit. In other words, they prompt viewers to imagine an alternative modernity erected on human cooperation with nature, rather than exploitation. The painting Nepantla (1995) is an ideal place to end a discussion of Barraza’s successful career. Arguably her masterpiece, the image blends Barraza’s commitment to social justice, to environmental awareness, and to cultural engagement. An indigenous woman occupies the foreground of the image, her back to the viewer but her face turned to her right at a three-quarter profile. The deep brown of her neck and cheek set off the intense blues, yellows, reds, and greens of her clothing, which bears the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe superimposed on the silhouette of the United Farm Worker eagle. Native plants of the Americas grow around her: two magueys, one at her feet and one in front of her; a prickly pear cactus to her left; and to her right, a lily with two white flowers and their yellow stamens. Neatly plowed fields move horizontally across the middle ground of the image, and tall mountains rise in the background beneath pillowy white clouds and a deep blue sky. The separate elements of the canvas are united through a dramatic foreshortening, so that “humanity, and nature are merged into one unit.”120 Barraza interprets Nepantla as a visual meditation on “border crossing and migration.” The context for the painting is important. She produced it in 1995 while in Saratoga, California, for the “Entre Americas” workshop. At the time, the “Golden State” was aflame with anti-immigrant and anti-Latino/a sentiment. A year prior, Republican governor Pete Wilson won a hard reelection fight against Democratic candidate Kathleen Brown by running on a racially charged platform that called for more militarized borders and a draconian criminal justice system. Voters had also recently passed Proposition 187, which was given the Orwellian name of the “Save Our State” initiative.121 Proposition 187 demanded that state and local law enforcement check the immigration status of persons accused of crimes; it refused public benefits to anyone who lacked proper identification; and it called for educators to verify the immigration status of schoolchildren and their parents. Federal courts later ruled that Proposition 187 was an unconstitutional violation of federal authority over immigration. However, the law became a template

figure 2.6. Nepantla (1995) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the artist.

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for harsher legislation in the twenty-first century, including Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (2010) and Alabama’s House Bill 56 (2011). Nepantla is a powerful rejoinder to the conservative movement’s xenophobic representation of migrants as freeloaders and degenerates. During his reelection campaign, Pete Wilson approved a thirty-second television ad that showed a black-and-white aerial view of dark bodies running across the San Diego border. A baritone voice-over warned spectators still feeling the effects of a 1992 recession that “they keep coming. . . . [T]he federal government won’t stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them.”122 Wilson’s ad trafficked in an anti-Mexican and anti-Latino/a discourse that runs deep in U.S. cultural history, from Richard Henry Dana’s nineteenth-century vilifying of the californios, to paranoia in the 1910s about the spillover effects of the Mexican Revolution, to the sensational media coverage of the Cuban Mariel boatlift in 1980. Nepantla confronts this discourse by humanizing the migrant subject. According to Barraza, “the composition narrates the journey of many immigrants and migrants adjusting themselves for survival as they venture into unknown territory.”123 By positioning viewers at the woman’s back, Barraza prompts them to see migration from her point of view. Viewers are encouraged to feel the emotions of fear, hope, sadness, and even anger that accompany the forced migrations. The woman is not a tragic figure, though. She is certainly not the pathological subject seen in Wilson’s campaign ad. A growing number of migrants from Mexico and Central America are Chiapans, Mixtecs, Tabascans, and other indigenous peoples who do not speak Spanish, or who speak it as a second language.124 The native symbology on the woman’s costume honors the sophisticated worlds from which these migrants come, and also testifies to the adaptive skills of migrants around the globe. The eagle at the center of the image does two things. It affirms the principle at the core of the UFW’s antipesticide campaign and of Chicano/a environmentalism more broadly, namely the idea that environmental protection and social justice are inseparable goals. It also gestures toward the continued power and promise of the Chicano movement. Artists—and particularly women artists—are sometimes accused of naïveté when they reference indigenous myth and imagery. Among Chicano/a cultural producers, Gloria Anzaldúa has been the most prominent target of this criticism. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, her 1987 collection of poetry and prose nonfiction, borrowed from Nahuatl and Mayan traditions a creative protest of the homophobic

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and racist policies of the Reagan administration. The success of the book was a milestone in movement politics and in queer history, but it also made Anzaldúa a target of misinformed criticism. In a 1991 essay, political pundit David Rieff dismissed Anzaldúa as a kind of “professional Aztec,” saying that Borderlands/La Frontera clings to “monolithic views of consciousness” that free-market capitalism has rendered obsolete.125 Her nationalist thinking, like the thinking of Luis Valdez (whom he also mentions), is “completely self-absorbed,” and “missing . . . any broadening notion of class, let alone economics.”126 Anzaldúa answered Rieff by turning his pejorative phrase “the new tribalism” into an affirmation of a post-NAFTA progressive politics focused on the intersections of class and race. However, this affirmation was not really a departure from movement politics, since (as Anzaldúa knew) Chicano/a cultural nationalists were always keenly aware of the interdependence of race and class in American social life. Anzaldúa was not naïve in her literary explorations of native traditions. What is naïve, though, is thinking that the indigenous no longer holds meaning in the modern world, or believing that the free-market system has erased the racial categories that organized capitalism in the first place. Like her late friend and colleague Anzaldúa, Barraza makes complex use of native traditions and histories. As Laura Pérez says of the artistic tradition to which both of these women belong: Chicana art is hardly nostalgic or reproductive of racialist essentialisms, as some fear. It is part of a broader attempt to interrupt unbridled capitalism and imperialist visions of reality. . . . The politics of the spiritual for many Chicana/os is linked to a politics of memory . . . not as politically paralyzing nostalgia for the irretrievable past but as a reimagining and thus, as a reformulation of beliefs and practices. It is more precisely a politics of the will to remember: to maintain in one’s consciousness, to recall, and to (re) integrate a spiritual worldview about the interconnectedness of life.127 “Reimagining” is the perfect word to describe Barraza’s images. Their dramatic coloration, creative use of space, and expert draught work pull viewers in, which in itself is no small accomplishment at a time when there is so much competition for eyes. Even more powerful is her ability to get viewers to ask questions of the art and of the world: What is the time and place of this scene? Who am I looking at? What do these symbols represent? Where does this image come from? The paintings have a

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defamiliarizing effect on viewers, whatever their background. If only for a moment, they make the familiar seem strange, and the strange seem familiar. They allow us, if only for a moment, to picture the world other than it is, to reimagine it, as Pérez says. Barraza’s longevity as an artist testifies to the vitality of Chicano/a cultural production across a timespan when progressive art is often said to be in decline. Her style has changed a great deal, as have the personal and political circumstances around her art, but there remains at the core of her portfolio a commitment to the democratic values that guided the Chicano movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Her art points to the broader directions of progressive Chicano/a politics. Some believe that the social movements of the postwar decades have lost their relevance. The 1960s in particular are reduced to fashion, or dismissed as youthful idealism. Barraza’s artistry gives viewers a picture of the environmental ethic that was part of movement politics. Unlike mainstream environmentalism, which tends to draw a bright line between society and nature, Chicano/a environmentalism sees social injustice and environmental damage as part of the same structures of inequality and indifference. This ethic has guided a number of important political projects during the last thirty years, including the Mothers of East Los Angeles campaign during the 1980s against the construction of a toxic-waste incinerator in the barrio; the work of Ganados del Valle, a cooperative that preserves sustainable agriculture and creates economic opportunities for Hispanos in northern New Mexico; and the efforts of the Austin-based Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice to expand immigrant rights. Campaigns like these show how the Chicano movement has evolved, just as Santa Barraza’s imaginative world illustrates the evolution of Chicano/a art.

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Immigrant Actos: Citizenship and Performance in El Teatro Campesino

The first years of the twenty-first century have been witness to intense attacks on some of the most vulnerable populations in the United States, including the undocumented workers whose cheap labor subsidized much of the boom economy of the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century. On December 16, 2005, after more than four years of post-9/11 fearmongering, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 4437, a piece of legislation that attempted to criminalize undocumented migrants by making “entry without inspection” a felony offense instead of a civil infraction. Thanks to mass mobilizations by migrants and their allies in the spring of 2006, the Sensenbrenner bill never made it to the Senate. However, September 11 and the “Great Recession” that began in 2008 continue to fan the flames of xenophobia. In April 2010, the Arizona legislature accomplished what the House GOP did not. Though it violated the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that immigration policy be directed by the federal government, Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 made undocumented entry a crime of trespassing, and further required legal immigrants to carry their paperwork at all times. Key portions of S.B. 1070 were put on hold for judicial review, but the attacks on immigrants continued. In March 2011, House Republicans led by Steve King of Iowa and Senate Republicans led by James Inhofe of Oklahoma introduced the English Language Unity Act of 2011 (H.R. 997/S. 503). The bill unsuccessfully tried “to declare English as the official language of the United States, to establish a uniform English language rule for naturalization, and to

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avoid misconstructions of the English language texts of the laws of the United States.”1 On May 18, 2012, Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama signed H.B. 658, which requires schools to verify the immigration status of children and also establishes a photo directory of undocumented migrants on the state’s Homeland Security website.2 The rising drumbeat of fear and anger toward immigrant workers is part of a distraction campaign by a political establishment eager to distract attention away from the growing levels of inequality across the country. Opinion about immigration policy among U.S. Latina/o populations is complex. The percentage of U.S. Latinos/as who are first-generation immigrants has been climbing steadily since the mid-twentieth century. According to one estimate, the foreign-born made up approximately 18 percent of the “Hispanic” population in 1960.3 By 2009, that percentage had climbed to nearly 40 percent, or just over 18 million people. Another 4 million are the U.S.-born children of undocumented migrants.4 Chicano/a and Latino/a communities have a lot at stake in the fight for migrant rights, but perspectives on the issue vary. Native-born Latinos/as show stronger support for migrant rights than non-Latinos/ as. A 2010 poll by the Pew Hispanic Center indicated that 86 percent of the U.S.-born Latinos/as believe that undocumented immigrants should be given a “path to citizenship,” compared with only 68 percent of the general public.5 Seventy-nine percent of all Latinos/as oppose Arizona’s S.B. 1070, while non-Latinos/as favor it two to one. Among Latinos/ as, though, there is some anxiety about the impact of undocumented immigration on their economic security, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. In 2007, half of all U.S-born Latinos/as believed that undocumented immigration was having a positive impact on the United States. By 2010, after the recession had begun, that number had dropped to 29 percent, with 30 percent saying it “made no difference,” and 31 percent saying the impact was negative.6 Only approximately 45 percent of native-born Latinos/as believe that they and the foreign-born share political goals. These intraethnic rifts have deep roots. They trace back to the casta system of Spanish and Mexican colonialism on what is now U.S. soil, and to that system’s complex gradations of class and skin color. Starting with the Franciscan missions of the 1700s and continuing through the secularized ranchos of the 1800s, considerable portions of the Southwest were governed by a racial hierarchy that put light-skinned, European-identified españoles (Spaniards) in positions of authority over darker-skinned mestizos (mixed-race persons), indios (Indians), and negros (blacks).7

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There was some flexibility in this system, but when the U.S.-Mexico border was converted from a relatively open region into a militarized zone during the 1920s and 1930s, the lines separating belonging and exclusion, privilege and privation, white and nonwhite, all hardened. Civic groups such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) defended Latino/a rights at a time of cultural repression and involuntary repatriation, but they did so by sometimes drawing a bright line between their mostly light-skinned, middle-class membership and darkerskinned, poorer immigrants.8 These racial and class divisions intensified again in the middle of the twentieth century. The paranoid security culture of the Cold War helped cement the image of “illegal” immigrants as a national security threat. Worried about the conservative assault on unions, labor leaders also began to represent undocumented immigrants as a threat to middle-class America. Mexican Americans and other Latino/a groups were influenced by these discourses. David G. Gutiérrez notes that “organizations ranging from LULAC and the American G.I. Forum to the NAWU all raised the specter of communism as part of their general arguments for immigration reform during the early 1950s.”9 Even Chicano labor activist César Chávez joined the chorus of anti-immigrant voices. By 1974, Chavez felt that control of the UFW was slipping away from him. Eager to regain public support and to assert his authority within a fracturing union, he lobbied for increased deportations, employer sanctions, and the creation of a national system of identification.10 Chávez’s call for stricter criminalization policies became the subject of heated debate among Mexican Americans. The UFW’s official position on immigration was consistent with the majority opinion of the American union movement, but by the early 1970s most Chicano/a activists were gravitating toward what Cynthia A. Young calls a “U.S. Third World Left” perspective that saw undocumented migration as an issue not of labor rights, but of human rights.11 At the vanguard of this shift was El Teatro Campesino, the “Farmworker’s Theater,” a performance collective that formed in 1965 as part of the grape strike in central California. In her influential book Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe argues that Asian American literary texts form “countersites” to the exclusionary practices of U.S. law and official culture.12 El Teatro Campesino performed the same kind of work in the context of Chicano/a politics. In fact, it often worked together with Asian Americans as part of a long and inspiring coalition between Mexicans and Asians in the central California region

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where El Teatro Campesino got its start. This celebrated Chicano/a theater group used its repertoire of actos, or skits, to articulate an alternative understanding of citizenship within the boundaries of the United States. Their model of performative citizenship (a phrase I adapt from May Joseph) was based not on papeles, or legal paperwork, but rather on the power of human creativity and community.13 The collective sought to reimagine the ethical obligation of the citizen to the alien, and to redefine the relationship between territory and nationality. Drama proved to be an especially effective genre for challenging the social and economic abuse of immigrants and for developing this new politics of belonging and citizenship. The exploitation of immigrants in the United States is sustainable only to the degree that the political and business classes can render immigrants and their labor invisible. They are often successful. Immigrant workers occasionally appear in U.S. public discourse, usually as freeloaders or as menace, but rarely are they seen. El Teatro Campesino turned the dominant perspective on its head. Instead of scapegoating immigrants for the economic crises created by a free-market system, the group represented them as protagonists in a dramatic confrontation between workers and corporations. For farmworkers, the actos were comforting. They felt empowered by the performances because the actos affirmed their dignity as humans and provided a much-needed space for expressing anger and sadness. For nonfarmworkers, the actos were discomforting, at least at first. El Teatro Campesino performances forced privileged members of the audience to experience the alienation that immigrants live with daily.

The Origins and Impact of El Teatro Campesino El Teatro Campesino emerged out of the celebrated farmworker huelga (strike) that began on September 16, 1965. Luis Valdez, a recent graduate of San Francisco State University and a member of the radical San Francisco Mime Troupe, met César Chávez when the labor organizer came to the Bay Area on a fund-raising tour.14 Moved by the clarity of Chávez’s vision and by his sincerity, Valdez returned with Chávez to the central California town of Delano, where the strike was headquartered and where Valdez himself had been born. Not long after arriving back at his hometown, Valdez typed up a pair of unpolished flyers, one of them in English and a more militant one in Spanish. He announced the creation of a “teatro popular” (popular theater), or what the English version called a “bi-lingual community farm workers’ theatre project.”

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He invited people to come and join this “foro publico vocal dramatico para expresar no solo las quejas presentes en nuestra lucha pero tambien los deseos y suenos de [sic] pueblo campesino y trabajador,” or, as the more sedate English version put it, a “forum which farm workers—the formerly silent of California—could use to express not just their present grievances but their future hopes as well.”15 No acting experience was needed. Using all capital letters, Valdez insisted that “NO ES NECESARIO HABER SIDO ACTOR, QUE LA EXPERIENCIA MAS IMPORTANTE EN ESTE TEATRO SE OBTIENE POR MEDIO DEL PIQUETE DE LA HUELGA” (It is not necessary to have been an actor, since the most important experience in this theater is obtained through the picket line). Luis Valdez launched El Teatro Campesino, but from the beginning it represented something far greater than any one person. El Teatro Campesino was a community of men and women who shared a commitment to progressive politics, to art, and to each other. The twenty or so people who formed the initial core of the group, along with the many who would come and go in those intense first years, thought of themselves as a family: they lived together, ate together, raised children together, traveled together, slept with each other, sometimes married, and buried their dead. It was not a perfect arrangement. There were intense and often very personal conflicts, including some that would eventually undermine the entire enterprise. Yet even amid these difficulties, El Teatro Campesino remained a singularly transformative experience. For many, being a player in El Teatro Campesino was a welcome alternative to a lifetime of unreliable labor as a field hand in an industry that stole not just wages, but also health, kinship, and hope. For others, being part of El Teatro Campesino offered a creative outlet that channeled emotions that might otherwise have gone to crime, addiction, or other destructive behaviors. The strong communal bonds within El Teatro Campesino gave energy and originality to the actos, the genre that formed the basis of the group’s success. The word acto is often translated within theatrical contexts as “skit,” but it can also mean “act” in the simple sense of action, a lexical ambiguity that captures El Teatro Campesino’s dual nature as both a performance and a political group. At the time El Teatro Campesino was developing its repertoire of these actos, much of mainstream theater was dominated by melodramatic psychodramas that relied on the minimalism of method acting and on cinematic effects to explore themes such as a supposedly universal existential angst or the crisis of the suburban family. El Teatro Campesino had its own minimalism, but theirs was not

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born out of a philosophy of negation. El Teatro Campesino’s minimalism was part of a “rasquache” aesthetic made necessary by an almost nonexistent production budget and by a desire to highlight the essential conflict between the growers and the farmworkers. In contrast to the Broadway, Off-Broadway, and repertory theater houses playing largely to enthusiasts, El Teatro Campesino played on the back of flatbed trucks, in public setbacks alongside major highways, in parks, and in union halls and churches. Instead of cinematic lighting and elaborate or detailed or careful props, El Teatro Campesino used thrift-store goods and hand-painted cardboard signs to identify setting and character. While the props were necessarily minimalist, the performances themselves were anything but. Once on their makeshift stage, El Teatro Campesino actors relied on loose, athletic movement, hyperbolized facial expressions, and boisterous dialogue. Broadwaystyle productions are often celebrated as the manifestation on stage of a playwright’s singular genius. Although the actos of El Teatro Campesino have wrongly been institutionalized within American literary history as the solitary work of Luis Valdez, they were in fact authored collectively and often spontaneously by the group during rehearsals and also by audiences, who through their laughter, shouting, and applause let the company know what worked and what didn’t. As Teatro Campesino performer Yolanda Parra puts it: “You know, we had a feeling that the work we were doing and the messages we were giving, the art we were doing was not just a theater thing that you go and see. . . . You had a feeling that what you were saying was changing lives, that what you were doing was going to change lives.”16 The improvisational and largely undocumeted nature of the actos makes them hard to study, but this ephemerality was at the center of El Teatro Campesino’s commitment to the demands of the moment. Because they were done on the cheap and because they could not be situated within dominant paradigms of what makes for theater, El Teatro Campesino struck some observers as unsophisticated. Yet like farmworkers who must constantly pretend to be naively content when they are not, the actos were deceptive in their appearance. Like all things Chicano/a, the actos were a complex mixture, a mestizaje, of different cultural traditions. They were influenced, for example, by the Greco-Roman classical tradition and particularly Aristotle’s idea of drama as catharsis, since El Teatro Campesino sought above all to provide farmworkers with a venue through which to express their sadness, their anger, and their desire. The actos were influenced also by a second ancient tradition, namely

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the Aztec or Nahuatl and other indigenous American rituals around the bufón declamador, or “oratorical buffoon,” who reminded audiences of life’s inconstancy through his “juxtaposition of joking and serious reflection.”17 There were several early modern and modern European influences as well. Primary among these was the medieval Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte, which involved traveling theater companies that did open-air performances of irreverent and unrefined comedies that were often critical of religious and political authorities or satires of religious and political authorities. Also important were the influences of Spanish “Golden Age” theater, Russian agitprop, and the Brechtian “theater of shock.”18 These diverse influences speak to the complexity of El Teatro Campesino’s aesthetic, but no tradition was more vital to El Teatro Campesino than what Yolanda Broyles-González aptly calls the “Mexican popular performance tradition” that has evolved north and south of the border over the last two centuries and more. Born out of the carpa, or tent theater, the Mexican popular performance tradition is an oral and embodied mode of expression that uses relajo—Spanish for what Broyles-Gonzales calls “a disruptive group cheekiness”—to criticize the powers that be and to provide a measure of relief from life’s daily struggles.19 Relajo takes many forms, but crucial to it is the figure of the pelado (masculine) or pelada (feminine), an “underdog” who is “bawdy, bold, gutsy, hilarious, thoroughly unpretentious, usually irreverent, and determined to survive.”20 The carpa tradition and its spirit of relajo remains a fixture in Mexican television, film, music, and theater, but it has also been an important part of Mexican cultures in the United States—Chicano/a cultures, in other words. There is some evidence to suggest that these Spanish-language theater traditions were active in what is today the American Southwest as far back as the late 1700s. We know with more certainty that by the mid1800s, as the region was passing from Mexican to U.S. control, the carpa traditions were congealing along established trade routes in California, Arizona, and Texas.21 By the 1930s, popular theater companies such as the family-run Circo Escalante were performing throughout what Jose Limón calls “Greater Mexico.”22 These companies—some of which were known to members of Teatro Campesino from their childhoods—were important on a practical level because they helped forge a sense of ethnic unity among class-divided Spanish-speakers in the United States, and also on a more symbolic level because they asserted a cultural and legal right of belonging for Mexicans within the United States, an assertion

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that was particularly urgent in the face of widespread and often illegal deportation campaigns of the 1930s.23 Drawing on this overlooked but rich tradition of American theater and distinguishing itself from the increasingly imitative Broadway style, El Teatro Campesino quickly became an essential ingredient of the huelga and (for better and for worse) a darling among theater commentators. Each night during the United Farm Worker’s celebrated 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento, El Teatro Campesino would perform their always-evolving actos before an audience of farmworkers and their supporters. These electric performances buoyed the spirits of the huelga participants and drew in countless new ones. As Harry Elam puts it, scenes like the one of Agustin Lira wearing a placard around his neck that read “Governor” and declaring his support for the strike while betrayed ranchers pulled him from the stage “fostered a mood of festivity, communitas, and subversive celebration in which both spectators and performers participated.”24 Soon after the March to Sacramento, El Teatro Campesino began traveling to college campuses and other venues across the country, raising funds, promoting the grape boycott, and raising awareness of farmworker injustice. The group continued to perform on the picket line and in the union hall, but the tension between direct labor organizing and theater production was becoming more apparent as El Teatro Campesino’s audience expanded. In 1967, El Teatro Campesino performed in a courtyard of the Senate Building after being called by Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Dick Yarborough of Texas to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. In 1969, the collective performed from its repertoire of actos at the World Theatre Festival in Nancy, France, where they were embraced by European theatergoers, who loved their innovative avant-garde aesthetic and their progressive politics. A tension between political action and artistic development compelled El Teatro Campesino to separate itself, at least organizationally, from the United Farm Workers union in the fall of 1967. The reasons were complex. Some members in the UFW and its allied AFL-CIO thought the theater collective too radical, and in many respects these individuals were justified in their thinking. The union generally saw itself as a domestic organization committed to labor reform within the United States, while El Teatro Campesino by and large saw itself as an international—what we would today call transnational—collectivity committed to human rights and perhaps even revolution. (César Chávez, the famous ambassador of the UFW, belonged to a political lineage that included Martin Luther

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King Jr. and Mahatma Ghandhi, while Luis Valdez, the public face of El Teatro Campesino, was more akin to the Latin American revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Jose Martí.) Of more immediate concern, though, was the fact that El Teatro Campesino’s vision for itself was quickly expanding beyond the union. The group’s sudden international fame beckoned them away from the fields and, more worrisome, threatened to overshadow the strike. Rather than be a distraction, El Teatro Campesino moved first to Del Rey, California, in 1967 and then Fresno in 1969. After being shot at by members of the John Birch Society and harassed by local officials, the group decided in 1971 to relocate to San Juan Bautista, a small town about sixty miles southeast of San Francisco, where it continues to stage a mixture of new productions, revivals of the actos and other older pieces, and religious pastorela plays that have become something of a regional institution at Christmas. The fact that El Teatro Campesino has managed to survive an eroding economy and a sustained conservative attack on the arts over the past thirty years is a credit to its audiences and its members, including its longtime director Luis Valdez. However, the organization today has very little of the dynamism it had in the first decade of its existence. When it began, El Teatro Campesino was fueled by the optimism of progressive Chicano/a activism and by a collective commitment to exploring on stage a complex migrant subjectivity largely ignored both in the world of theater and in the public sphere. Over time, the organization became more of a traditional theater company built around marketing and promotion, the star system, critical opinion, grant writing, and revenue generation. It is tempting to read this evolution as symptomatic of a larger cultural drift from 1960s radicalism to 1970s opportunism, but such narratives hide more than they reveal. El Teatro Campesino’s evolution was less a product of cultural decline and more a product of choices made by Valdez and others about audience. These choices were neither inevitable nor irrational. In deciding to “mainstream,” El Teatro Campesino, Inc. gained a more reliable stream of income and easier access to cultural capital, including opportunities in New York and Hollywood. What the company sacrificed, however, was the vitality that came from being both mirror and muse of the huelga.25 While any honest accounting of El Teatro Campesino has to take into consideration this changing relationship to social movement politics, it would be a mistake to conclude that the collective’s original vision was somehow a failure. Nothing is ever lost in politics: the actions of an individual or a movement pursuing justice and equality may not accomplish

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their immediate goal, but the energy that went into them and the example they set often serves as a resource for other kinds of activity—sometimes not highly publicized or conspicuous—toward the same end. Much the same can be said of art. Once an artist or cultural producer releases a work to the public, she or he can no longer control its future. This vulnerability can undoubtedly be the source of great anxiety for artists, but it can also be the source of great hope. A work might find a small audience when it is first released, only to later reach a wider audience when the time is right. Or a work might never find a large audience, but it finds the right audience, and in doing so it becomes valuable in ways that its creator never predicted. In other words, the movement of art—as with politics—is never linear. A work can have one kind of urgency at one time and space but then later take on a different and new significance at another time and place. So it is with the work or repertoire of El Teatro Campesino. The impact that El Teatro Campesino had during the 1960s and 1970s on the farmworkers’ strike and on Chicano/a politics more broadly is clear. First and foremost, the actos of El Teatro Campesino gave courage and comfort to the impoverished farmworkers who risked so much by going on strike. The performances that took place on truckbeds and alongside roadways converted scabs and entertained the huelgistas as they endured long days on the picket line; the performances enacted in the union hall on Friday nights helped build comaraderie among a diverse workforce comprised of Mexicans, Filipinos, and others. Second, the actos became a valuable fund-raising tool, and as they traveled they helped educate a broader public in the United States and around the world about the labor invested in the food we eat. The general public in the United States had close to no knowledge of agricultural exploitation prior to the grape strike, but now even the apolitical have at least a vague sense that farmworkers labor under difficult circumstances.26 Finally, the actos of El Teatro Campesino proved that there was a tangible audience for Chicano/a theater and therefore that Chicano/a artists could make a life—however modest—of their creativity. In this way, El Teatro Campesino paved the way for a still-vibrant Chicano/a and Latino/a tradition that includes well-known figures like Cherríe Moraga, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and Culture Clash, as well as lesser-known but important performance artists like Marisela Norte, Quique Avilés, Elvira and Hortensia Colorado, Marga Gomez, and many others. These are some of the more obvious ways that the actos have shaped the present, even with the institutional changes that Broyles-González

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has documented. Yet as important as these are, what I want to develop now is the idea that the most lasting significance of these actos and the source of their real usefulness for today lies in the alternative model of citizenship they enacted wherever they were performed. As we will see in the section that follows, El Teatro Campesino used its innovative art to attack a model of restrictive citizenship that was taking shape at the time and to enact in its place an inclusive model of performative citizenship in which belonging is based not on entrenched hierarchies of race and class or race and money, but rather on the communities that emerge from shared labor and shared living.

Restaging Citizenship The year that El Teatro Campesino began, 1965, was pivotal in the history of U.S. immigration politics. In October of that year, at the base of the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration Act of 1965, a piece of legislation that ended the racialized system of national origins quotas and replaced it with preferences for skilled labor and family reunification. Commentators often describe this moment as a liberal departure from a long history of racist immigration policy that began in 1790, when an infant United States Congress passed legislation limiting naturalization to “free white persons.” The nation’s intense need for cheap labor meant that this racial preference as to who was in its borders went largely unenforced during its decades of colonial expansion, but in 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act began an era of more deliberate racial restrictions nurtured by the industrialists’ need for a more pliable labor force and by the politicians’ parallel need for votes that satisfy a paranoid public. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which historian Mae Ngai describes as “the nation’s first comprehensive restriction law,” doubled down on these policies and established what Ngai calls “a global racial and national hierarchy” designed to protect the nation’s fictive Anglo-Saxon heritage.27 The Immigration Act of 1965 dramatically reconfigured this history of exclusion. Together with the 1952 McCarranWalter Act’s ban on racial bars to citizenship, the Hart-Celler Act (as it was also known) allowed for expanded immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, setting the United States on course for becoming a “majority-minority” country. Yet even as this revered law from America’s golden age of liberalism ensured that U.S. immigration policy would be officially race-blind, it simultaneously preserved and expanded exclusionary principles that in

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practice kept race at the very heart of citizenship politics. As Ngai brilliantly analyzes, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and other restrictive laws were premised on an ideological assumption that every person seeking admission to the United States was a potential national-security threat.28 On the basis of this assumption, the Supreme Court has historically given Congress tremendous latitude in matters of immigration and has thus naturalized the idea that a nation’s right to defend itself against threats real or imagined takes precedence over the human right to mobility, a right enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights and other founding texts of liberalism. The Immigration Act of 1965 did nothing to challenge this assumption. Hart-Celler was motivated less by a sincere commitment to human rights and more by a desire to bring once-marginalized white ethnics (Italian Americans, for example) into the fold of the Democratic Party and by the need to curry favor with potential Third World allies. Midcentury immigration reforms “only hardened the distinction between citizen and alien,” and they did so in a way that preserved rather than abolished existing racial hierarchies.29 While there is no longer a quota system scaled according to ideologies of white supremacy, the post-1965 system grants an allotment by hemisphere and then sets an identical cap for each nation, this in spite of predictably higher demand from Third World countries still grappling with the consequences of colonialism and the destructive effects of neoliberal trade policies. This studied imbalance between supply and demand guarantees a reliable flow of “illegal aliens” who gain entry to the country but are kept at the margins because legal precedent marks them as a security threat, particularly if they are persons of color. These restrictive immigration policies have been sold to U.S. citizens as a form of protection against foreign dangers, but ironically they have steadily undermined the value of citizenship from within. From the vantage point of the official legal apparatus, being a citizen has very little to do with the active bonds of community that purportedly give the nation life. That is because our system of birthright citizenship, for all of its virtues, renders the institution passive in that a person becomes a citizen not by a conscious decision on his or her part but rather by the contingent circumstances of nativity. It is of course possible for aliens to choose citizenship, but even here the process is rendered passive through the magical metaphor of naturalization. Around election time, lipservice gets paid to the ideal of the citizen, and in our consumer capitalist economy we are constantly encouraged to think of shopping as political participation. In general, though, being a citizen is perceived less as what

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one does and more what one is. The principle of citizenship as a living commitment to the commonwealth is inoperative. What we have instead is a “necrocitizenship” in which belonging is reduced to having the right paperwork: visas, birth certificates, passports, green cards, naturalization records, bank statements, travel itineraries, and other “dead letters” (to use Melville’s famous phrase).30 Clearly, this model of paper citizenship has debilitating effects for the millions of immigrants who contribute to the moral, economic, and cultural fabric of the nation, often through considerable suffering, but who are barred from exercising the rights and the privileges of the citizen because they “entered without inspection.” Undocumented immigrants live in a state of constant anxiety because they know that at any moment they could be forcibly removed from their communities of choice. At work, they routinely encounter poverty wages, dangerous working conditions, sexual harassment and other forms of intimidation, and job insecurity. Outside of the workplace, they live with overcrowded housing, vulnerability to crime, high rates of depression, inadequate health care, and the knowledge that their kinship networks—which at times include citizen children—can be ripped apart by the state. It is true that undocumented immigrants have limited rights to due process, among them the right to sue for stolen wages. And of course their subjectivity is not defined solely by their victimization. Yet as “illegal aliens” they are what Ngai calls the “impossible subjects” of the law, physically in the nation and subject to its authority but not entitled to its rights and privileges. They are ghostlike, a fact that El Teatro Campesino captures vividly in the 1971 skit Soldado Razo. In this powerful acto, the protagonist Johnny, a second-generation Chicano, is preparing to go off to Vietnam, where he hopes his military service will secure him and his immigrant family full membership in America. Throughout the bilingual play, the audience is addressed directly by the character “Muerte,” who, costumed in black, recalls both Mexican “Day of the Dead” rituals and the phantasmatic place of the migrant in U.S. society. At the story’s climax, we are told by Muerte that “Johnny left for Vietnam, never to return” but that “before he died he saw many things . . . he had his eyes opened.”31 A soldier’s willingness to die for the nation traditionally represents the “full measure” of citizenship, but Johnny’s death at Chu Lai in November of 1965 transforms him not into a citizen with standing but rather into a disembodied “skull” that signifies the impossibility of migrant inclusion. In the powerful final scene of Soldado Razo, the ghostly Johnny has a dialogue with

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his mother, also alive-but-dead, and tells her of a dream in which he entered a Vietnamese home “firing my M-16 porque sabia que el village estaba controlado por los gooks” (firing my M-16 because I knew that the village was controlled by gooks).32 The terrified soldier “killed three of them right away,” but, to his horror, “when I looked down it was mi ‘apa, el carnalillo and you, jefita” (when I looked down it was my father, my little brother, and you, Momma).33 Johnny’s nightmare is more than the typical soldier’s repressed fears coming to the surface. It represents a tormented vision of how restrictive citizenship gives life to some but death to others—even others living a world away. The injustices that these kinds of restrictive policies routinely visit upon undocumented migrants are sufficient grounds for a thorough reconsideration of what it means to belong to the nation, but there is all the more reason to do so when one considers the damage these restrictions do to the very citizens said to be protected by them. One of course cannot discount the tangible benefits that Americans receive almost daily from the marginalized condition of the undocumented subject. In addition to artificially lowered costs for child care, cleaning, maintenance, and other household expenses, migrant labor yields lower prices for just about every commodity you can think of, particularly food, for which Americans pay too little.34 Yet while the exploitation of undocumented labor in the short run produces economic benefits, in the long run it is eroding the meaning and value of citizenship, even for those who can claim it. That is because much of the power and promise of democratic citizenship comes from an imagined horizontal equality between members of a given social group. We all know that no nation on the face of the globe has ever realized this equality in practice. Nevertheless, the ideal helps create affective ties between citizens and serves as an incentive for political participation. If I believe my rights to be only as strong as those of my fellow citizens, then I have a compelling motive for ensuring the welfare of those around me. At first glance, the “illegal alien” seems to heighten the value of citizenship by making it appear scarce. Citizens flatter themselves to think they possess something that racialized others long for, and yet the moment it becomes possible to imagine an entire class of people who are part of the social body yet denied the rights of citizenship, it also becomes possible to imagine similar class distinctions operating between citizens, and not merely because of accidents of birth but because of systemic necessity. The exploitation of migrant labor slowly undoes our guiding vision of the nation as a community of equals, leaving in its place a sadly more

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realistic image of individuals competing against each other in a rigged game. No wonder then that so much time and energy is expended in purging undocumented subjects or pretending they do not exist: they remind us just how frail a promise citizenship really is. The threat posed by these migrant communities to the dominant models of citizenship is so intense that many conservatives who falsely profess a devotion to the “original intent” of the U.S. Constitution are attempting to end “birthright citizenship,” a cornerstone of U.S. law that the founders of the nation saw as a defining difference between the Old World and the New. It is against this backdrop of restrictive immigration policies that El Teatro Campesino articulated an alternative model of citizenship based not on paperwork but on community-building labor. This model of what I will be describing below as performative citizenship was founded on a fundamentally different perception of migrant laborers than that of the dominant legal and social order. Historically, those in power have been content to either ignore farmworkers or to see them as little more than unthinking implements in the productive process. It is hard to say which of these is worse. Quite often even today migrant workers, their communities, and their contributions to the United States are rendered invisible by the deeply entrenched mythologies that surround American agriculture. Many people picture farms in California and other parts of the nation as small, family-run operations where humble people live in close communion with nature and produce food more out of duty than self-interest. This image is no accident. The powerful growers’ associations first formed in the late 1800s have nurturned it through large-scale advertising campaigns in order to disguise the gradual corporatization of agriculture over the past century. The reality is that today very few family farms produce goods for market. Because of consolidation, the largest 6 percent of farms produce 75 percent of all vegetables produced in the United States, while 80 percent of the fruit is produced by the largest 10 percent of growers.35 Migrant labor—and Mexican migrant labor in particular—is responsible for most of the nation’s annual harvest, and yet these laborers are largely invisible because our idealized picture of the American farm exists not as a realistic portrayal but as an expression of certain national fantasies (to use Lauren Berlant’s term) about the abundance of American soil and the self-reliance of its white heartlands. During those relatively rare periods when farmworkers are made visible through social movement activism, racist ideologies often intervene to persuade the public that the status quo is acceptable to all parties. It was once widely held that nature had adapted Indians, Chinese, Japanese,

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Filipinos, Mexicans, and other racialized populations in the “ethnic succession” of U.S. farm labor for precisely this kind of work. The logic of this backhanded praise is that the world works best when people stick to what they’re good at. To many this seems reasonable enough, but it was and remains an ideological ruse. Despite its claims to truthfulness, the stereotype of the contented farmworker is not at all driven by the character of farmworkers themsleves, who are every bit as intelligent and foolish, virtuous and ignoble, hardworking and lazy as the rest of humanity. It is driven instead by the needs of an industrial agriculture system that must make its workers into machines, even as it relies on humans to do tasks machines still cannot do.36 We might today like to think of ourselves as above the vulgar racism of a George Murphy, but our society finds new ways of invoking racial difference to excuse the inexcusable, either by saying that migrants should be grateful to be out of the poverty of their country of birth, that they are security threats, that they stubbornly refuse to learn our ways, or that their culture doesn’t let them get ahead. Each of these rationales studiously ignores the larger political dynamics at work, and in doing so they function much like the biological arguments so popular at the start of the 1900s. El Teatro Campesino took a radically different view of migrant subjectivity, seeing it not as a corruption of some fictitious national character but as a dynamic social universe that offered new avenues for realizing social justice inside the nation’s borders and beyond. What corporate and government authorities had wanted to do, beginning with the Bracero Program, was sever migrant labor from migrant cultures in order to maximize private profit while preserving the perceived Anglo-Saxon core of America. (This strategy, it should be noted, was part of an emergent neoliberalism constantly redrawing the lines between private and public in order to create more “flexible” labor arrangements.) The members of El Teatro Campesino rejected this ideological divide and instead with their audience drew active parallels between commodity labor and creative labor. For them, the labor that went into the harvest was the same labor that went into poetry and dance and theater and music. The labor that went into these and other arts was in turn the same labor that went into building strong communities. Their ideal approximated Karl Marx’s utopian vision of a society in which a person could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”37 Where industry expropriated migrant labor in order to realize profits, El Teatro Campesino drew upon it to make a pathbreaking art form

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that was by, for, and about farmworkers. Nearly all of the members had extensive experience in the fields. Mexico-born Felipe Cantú, the beloved comic genius of the collective, worked as a migrant laborer all his life.38 Olivia Chumacero, raised in a farmworker family and experienced in farmwork, joined El Teatro Campesino because it recognized that “nosotros los campesinos tenemos tanto corazon, tantos suenos, tantos deseos, tantas esperanzas tantas ideas, tanta folosofía como cualquier otra raza. . . . And I had never seen it anywhere” (we farmworkers have as much heart, as many dreams, as many desires, as many hopes, as many dreams, as much philosophy as other people. . . . And I had never seen it anywhere).39 Luis Valdez had earned a degree from San Francisco State, but he too knew agricultural work firsthand. Living and working together as a commune, the ensemble members drew on their experience to produce actos that through humor and tragedy represented the full humanity of farmworkers. And while El Teatro Campesino performed these actos around the world before audiences of many backgrounds, their most important audience was always the farmworkers themselves. As Chumacero described it in an interview by Yolanda Broyles-González, performances before farmworkers were always more energetic, more creative, and more memorable than any others: “In performances for raza . . . the audiences had no qualms about expressing their emotions, thoughts or opinions out loud. We had cat-calls, piropos [flirtations], gritos [shouts], and running commentaries. . . . You don’t ignore what people called out. You acknowledge it; you pick it up and—if needed— threw it back.”40 She adds that “if the audience was upper-middle-class or Anglo, they were far more restrained and quiet.”41 We can see then how El Teatro Campesino’s vastly different perception of the migrant subject produced another model of citizenship than the one guiding dominant society. Within the aesthetic and political vision of this influential collective, citizenship is a vital force that stems neither from the jus solis of birthplace nor the jus sanguinus of blood but rather from the ideal of human dignity, a jus humanus that finds expression in creative acts. There is a certain irony to all of this. As they are today, Chicano/a activists of the 1960s and 1970s were often accused of being exclusionary and even of being “reverse racists” for championing the neglected interests of their communities. Yet it was the largely EuroAmerican power elites who generated wealth for themselves by legislating restrictive citizenship and then enforcing that legislation through an increasingly militarized border enforcement. The performative citizenship advocated by El Teatro Campesino emerged from the unique

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insights of migrant subjectivity, but it was an ideal that affirmed the humanity of all people, regardless of race. Importantly, and in contrast to traditional liberal models of citizenship that revolve around the individual, this performative citizenship revolved around community. As El Teatro Campesino framed it, there was and is a sharp contrast between the gringo understanding of citizenship and the Chicano/a understanding: while the former exists to protect private property rights, the latter exists to provide for the public good. Fittingly, El Teatro Campesino’s commitment to a citizenship without papers corresponded with an aesthetic commitment to improvisational and highly physical performances. As they ambitiously phrased it in their prefatory “Notes on Chicano Theater” for the 1972 volume of actos, Chicano theater is “theater as beautiful, rasquachi, human, cosmic, broad, deep, tragic, comic, as the life of La Raza itself. . . . Chicano theater, then[,] is first a reaffirmation of LIFE.”42 In keeping with this spirit, the actos were rarely written down. Luis Valdez or another member of the collective might sketch out a story, but in rehearsals and other communal gatherings that initial idea would go through extensive revision. Once on stage, the material was reworked even further, with performers adjusting the plot and ad-libbing movement and dialogue in response to the crowd. Audiences in fact became performers, and as a result, no two performances were the same. The normally jaded critical establishment loved it. Coming at a time when both the production and the consumption of Broadway and other mainstream theater was increasingly standardized, El Teatro Campesino was a raucous and joyful experience, either in spite of or because of its emergence from privation. As San Francisco drama critic Ralph Gleason put it, El Teatro Campesino was “vital, earthy and vividly alive theater.”43 More importantly, though, the actos of El Teatro Campesino were beloved or praised by the farmworkers themselves. The reasons are several. First is the simple but essential fact that El Teatro Campesino provided entertainment on a hot summer weekday or a cool Central Valley Friday night. We all need fun, but the pleasures of being part of a crowd and getting lost in a well-crafted production were especially meaningful to individuals whose lives were dominated by work discipline and by the relentless pressures of poverty. Felipe Cantú’s unique comic talent was particularly significant in this regard: ensemble member Agustín Lira, himself no slouch, said that “Si estabamos muy tristes por question que sufriamos mucho en la huelga, Felipe nos hace reir. . . . El buscaba siempre el modo de alegrar la gente” (If we were sad because we

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were suffering a lot with the strike, Felipe made us laugh. . . . [H]e was always looking for some way to make the people happy”).44 The actos also provided much-needed catharsis. The almost constant awareness of unbelonging that undocumented subjects experience leads often to undiagnosed depression, pent-up anger, guilt, and feelings of worthlessness. Farmworker Algimiro Morales describes the situation eloquently: “As a migrant, you find yourself living in a different, uncomfortable world. . . . There’s so much rejection and hostility. People look at you as if you are beneath them. They see you as nothing, and then you begin to feel that, outside of your community, perhaps you really are worthless.”45 In that noble Aristotelian understanding of theater, El Teatro Campesino performances represented a safe space in which farmworkers could experience their collective bonds and through laughter and tears—both common responses to the actos—could give expression to the feelings of sadness and righteous indignation they otherwise had to suppress. Crucially, El Teatro Campesino also provided a mechanism for dealing with the source of these feelings, namely a hopeless anxiety that the world as it is cannot be changed. Consistent with these feelings of powerlessness, many farmworkers (like the rest of us) are vulnerable to the belief that their predicament is a matter of fate rather than social contingencies. El Teatro Campesino illuminated the ways in which farmworkers were victimized, but it did not represent them as victims. Instead, by plotting social conflict through a minimalist style that emphasized each person’s role in the larger system rather than his or her inner character, and by making the farmworker the underdog protagonist, the actos were an invitation to farmworkers to see themselves as actors in the fullest sense of that word. El Teatro Campesino was unapologetic about these innovative political ambitions. With characteristically high-minded rhetoric, they declared that “Chicano theater . . . must be popular, subject to no other critics except the pueblo itself; but it must also educate the pueblo toward an appreciation of social change, on and off the stage.”46 This linkage between theater and politics is at the very heart of performative citizenship, and while this ideal is foundational to the entire repertoire of El Teatro Campesino, its nature and significance gets its clearest thematization in the skit La quinta temporada (The fifth season). First performed in 1966 at a union meeting in Delano’s Filipino Hall, La quinta temporada tells the story of a migrant just arrived in the Central Valley. “Jose” is part of a major transnational labor circuit between Mexico, Texas, and California, and he is looking for work because as he tells the audience, “I need to send money back to my familia.”47 Things go well

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at first. The harvest is near, and a labor contractor approaches Jose with promises of easy money: “Mire,” Don Coyote says, “this summer is coming fat, FAT! . . . Dollar bills, five dollar bills, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred dollar bill and all you have to do is . . . catch!”48 Jose moves frantically to catch the play money in his hat, but the farmworker audience recognizes from experience that the man is being lied to: contratistas (labor contractors) like Don Coyote will say anything to get workers for the harvest, but as payday comes and winter nears, the farmworker will end up broke. Jose must learn this lesson as well. Not long after we meet the migrant, Don Coyote, and the Patron, the character “Summer” appears on stage “dressed in an ordinary workshirt and khaki hat” that are covered in “paper money”—a playful tribute to the supreme power of cash in our lives, as well as its artificiality.49 Yet before the dramatic arrival of the utopic “quinta temporada,” or fifth season, the farmworker must first meet “Winter,” an unforgiving character who “leaps into the scene” from stage left demanding “money for gas, lights, telephone, rent.”50 Like all of the actos, La quinta temporada is a complex text that works on multiple levels. It is structured, though, around the ideological and practical contrast between restrictive citizenship and performative citizenhip. When we first meet Jose, he has a naïve belief in his equal standing with those he encounters. His opening address to the audience is a clear sign of his self-confidence and optimism, and his energetic handshake with Don Coyote to affirm their business relationship is evidence of faith in promises made and kept. It is only when Jose is introduced to the contratista and then to the Patron that he begins to realize that within an economy of restrictive citizenship, the life of the alien does not have the same value as the life of the citizen. Significantly, it is the Mexican Don Coyote—and not the white grower—who gives Jose his first lesson in migrant civics. The contractor had treated the farmworker with a modicum of respect when he was looking for laborers, but the moment a deal is in place, the white grower appears and the dynamic changes. Suddenly the once bold Don Coyote becomes obsequious, pushing the farmworker out of the way and falling to the ground to kiss the Patron’s boots. (Such scenes were always performed with comic abandon.) When the boss asks if his summer crew is ready, Don Coyote summons Jose and rudely demands that he remove his hat, yelling “El sombrero, babozo” (The hat, idiot).51 Everything is different now that Jose has been caught up within the exploitative labor system of the fields: his pockets are picked, he is spat upon and kicked, insulted, lied to, and forced to endure poverty while others around him

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are making money. Refused the protections of citizenship, he is left completely vulnerable to the unfeeling boom-and-bust realities of the business cycle. While the Patron heads to Acapulco—an ironic reversal of the migrant’s path from Mexico to the United States—Jose is left alone and shivering as Winter dumps handful after handful of snow on his head. The contratista plays a vital role in other ways. Indeed, Don Coyote is not as powerful as the boss, but he forms an essential part of El Teatro Campesino’s critique of restrictive citizenship. Contractors (or enganches, as they are often called) occupy a powerful position within the U.S. farm system, forming what Richard Steven Street describes as “the essential link in the chain of agricultural development.”52 Because they often come from the same ethnic background as the laborers they recruit, they function as conduits between the “foreign” cultures of the workers and the mostly white, English-language ownership class. La quinta temporada acknowledges this important dynamic as Don Coyote and Jose speak to each other in the distinctive language of migrant communities. “Busca jale?,” Don Coyote asks, choosing to use a vernacular Spanish to ask if the man is looking for work.53 The Patron, by contrast, is monolingual, which means that his business succeeds or fails on the ability of the contractor to translate linguistic and cultural capital into recruits for the time-sensitive harvest. The contractors are also important because they let growers off the hook for some of the worst abuses of the farm labor system. As in other corporate sectors, the agriculture industry routinely outsources much of its ugliest work so that it can maintain plausible deniability when its corrupt labor practices are made public. Contractors provide the unregulated and often dangerous transportation that gets farmworkers to the fields; they make the false promises that draw workers to a particular employer; they enforce work discipline on the jobsite; and they deduct from farmworker pay to cover inflated expenses. El Teatro Campesino critiqued these aspects of the farm-labor system as well, and long before the problem of outsourcing was widely recognized. In La quinta temporada, Don Coyote makes his meager living by stealing from the laborer he brought on board. There is a Buster Keaton– style comedy to this interaction: Jose gets money from the personified Summer and Winter harvests and puts it in his back pocket; Don Coyote grabs the cash while the farmworker is distracted and passes it to the Patron, who then counts it and hides it away. The scene’s humor gives the audience a vivid and memorable image of labor exploitation, but predictably Jose himself is furious when he discovers he is being robbed. He tries

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to confront Don Coyote, only to have the contractor mock him with the suggestion that Jose can’t manage money. When the farmworker fights back after being robbed a second time, the Patron cheers as Don Coyote assaults Jose with his rubber-soled boots. The patron is so pleased that he rewards the contratista with what the script in its typical biting humor describes as “a huge bone with big black letters spelling out the word ‘bonus.’”54 Don Coyote’s presence in this play gives spectators a key insight: under a regime of restrictive citizenship, the line between citizen and alien is not coterminous with the line between white and nonwhite. According to Street, the first ethnics to systematically blur this distinction in California were the so-called “China bosses” who managed the Chinese labor transition from railroad work to farming toward the late 1800s.55 Since that time a racially marked contractor class has continued to help legitimate exploitation in the fields by giving laborers an exaggerated image of American upward mobility, and also by indirectly suggesting to the public that race is not central to our increasingly unequal class system. The members of El Teatro Campesino did not want to merely comfort its farmworker audiences. Certainly that was important, but the collective also wanted to challenge Chicano/a audiences, to cause them to see through “the mirror of our theater” not just what was good among la raza, but also what was destructive.56 With Don Coyotes sometimes in attendance, El Teatro Campesino sought to “heighten the differences” and thereby shame contractors into supporting the workers. More generally, El Teatro Campesino sought to persuade Mexicans in America no matter their background to make common cause with migrant subjects and to become part of the Chicano movement. Across the country, La quinta temporada, the celebrated Los vendidos, and other actos were remarkably successful in this goal. But of course in saying that Chicanos and Chicanas are sometimes complicit in these patterns of inequality, El Teatro Campesino was in no way saying that they bear equal responsibility or gain equal benefit. To the contrary, much of the tragic humor of Don Coyote lies in the fact that his reward for collaboration is so meager. The contratista receives a few extra dollars and an occasional hueso, or bone, for his cruel service, but he, too, must endure the Patron’s racist abuses and he, too, is swindled by the boss. When Don Coyote comes to the Patron after the summer harvest and asks how much they got from the farmworker’s pocket, the Patron lies with a melodramatic, “Terrible! We’re going to have to ask for a Federal Subsidy.”57 Later, when the tables have been turned and Winter is demanding

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money from the Patron because of a protracted strike, the grower again lies and says: “I don’t have any more. Except what I have in the bank.”58 These two brief moments are clearly mocking the complex financial instruments, byzantine organizational structures, corporate tax shelters, and other legal procedures that food conglomerates use to evade social responsibility. They also point to the ways in which both growers and the privileged citizenry—often but not always white—profit directly from the stolen labor of migrant subjects. In one of the crucial scenes of the play, after Jose confronts the Patron for stealing wages, Don Coyote abruptly pulls the farmworker aside and yells, “No! I know who has your money.”59 The stage directions indicate that the contractor then “points out toward the audience making a semi-circle from S.L. [stage left] to S.R. [stage right], finally stopping at the Patron and pointing at him inadvertently.”60 Eager to correct his “mistake,” Don Coyote rescinds this gesture and says, “Autumn has your money.” He wants to persuade Jose that farmworker poverty is built into the natural order of things, but he has already let slip the fact that it emerges from a rigged system that favors growers and the general public. Jose, like the audience, can now see clearly what is going on. I described above the play’s climax, which has Jose alone on a largely barren stage and without adequate food, shelter, and clothing to protect himself from the unfeeling Winter. It is a scene that reflects the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s notion of Verfremdung, or theater as alienation, on the repertoire of El Teatro Campesino. The farmworker has been stripped of his illusions about the world he lives in, and as we watch him suffer, we as spectators are challenged to interrogate our own involvement in the scene. On occasion critics complained that such moments in El Teatro Campesino were too didactic. Having been raised on the conventions of American realism, students in my classroom often share this reaction when first introduced to the actos. They often come to like the plays, though, when they learn why these productions so studiously avoid being realistic. Though the idea was of relatively recent coinage, by the 1960s it had become natural to think of farmwork as the province of purportedly low-skilled, racialized, and often criminalized migrant labor. El Teatro Campesino’s confrontational aesthetic went out of its way to emphasize the unnaturalness of the modern farm labor system, and in doing so it prompted spectators to imagine alternatives. In its dénouement, La quinta temporada even performs for spectators a utopic vision of how such an alternative might look, naming it “the fifth season.” The realization of this better world is set in motion when

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Spring appears on stage and forces Winter away. As with too many of the female characters that El Teatro Campesino set on stage, la primavera (Spring) has a small number of lines and depends heavily on gender clichés—a particularly frustrating fact given that this group was capable of being truly original in so many other ways. Problematic though it is, the appearance of this figure of transformation is vital to the play because it marks the pivotal shift from restrictive citizenship to a more inclusive model of performative citizenship. It is Spring, after all, who informs the farmworker that he has rights worth fighting for.61 When she then leaves the stage, the contractor reappears, only to be met this time by a newly defiant farmworker. Jose tells Don Coyote and the Patron that he is on strike and will only work when he has “Un contrato bien firmadito” (a signed contract).62 The grower falls to the floor in slapstick fashion, “kicking and snorting like a wild horse” while his contractor “leaps on his back and rides him like a bronco” until the man is calm.63 As Summer exits the stage and Autumn appears, the worker is tempted to accept a handout from the contratista. He stops, though, when Spring reappears “dressed as a nun representing the churches.” Summer reappears as well, this time identified as unions and holding “a contract and an oversized pencil.”64 Formerly alienated from the citizenry, Jose now has the support of religious groups and labor groups. The always-aggressive Winter once again “charges” the farmworker but is this time “repulsed by the churches, la raza, and the unions.”65 Hungry for money, Winter pelts the grower with snow until the Patron is forced to sign a contract giving a two-dollar-per-hour wage, bathrooms in the fields, and paid vacations.66 Suddenly the personified season remembers something. Removing the cardboard sign that El Teatro Campesino players wore around their neck to identify their characters, Winter reveals a new sign underneath that reads “La justicia social” (social justice). He declares himself “the fifth season!” and he adds with comic irreverence that “Si alguien pregunta que paso con ese contratista chueco, diganle que se lo llevo la quinta chin—LA QUINTA TEMPORADA!!” (If anybody asks what happened with that crooked contractor, tell them he was caught by the fuc—THE FIFTH SEASON!!).67 Influenced by a Marxist utopianism and an indigenous vision of a “quinto sol” (fifth sun), this fifth season symbolizes a world where collective action has put an end to natural and artificial scarcities. It is a world built on the principles of performative citizenship, a world that makes no distinction between native and foreigner because it is concerned only with human need. El Teatro Campesino had its flaws, but

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lack of ambition was not one of them. Through theater, the collective strove to reimagine for itself and for audiences the meaning and value of the status of “citizen.”

Reclaiming Territory In the section above, I explored how El Teatro Campesino was able to use theater to conceptualize an alternative to the ideology of restrictive citizenship. This next section examines how the actos also redrew the map of the nation, since by challenging the divide between citizen and alien, these performances were at the same time commenting on the relationship between citizen and territory. Civil rights campaigns are rightly understood as debates over how individuals within a given national territory relate to each other in the imagined horizontal and real vertical relations of citizenship. However, in less obvious ways, civil rights struggles are also about the relationship between individuals and the territory itself: Who can occupy the land? How will the land get used? What gives the land its value? Who owns the land? This dynamic between citizenship and territory is evident in the Chicano movement, and nowhere more than in the complex and sometimes contradictory discourse of Aztlán.68 El Teatro Campesino was uniquely influential in popularizing this native discourse. After workshops with conchero dancer Andres Segura and Mayan expert Domingo Martínez Paredez in 1970 and 1971, the trend-setting group shifted away from its explicitly political actos and instead began to produce neoindigenous mitos (myths), among them Baile de los gigantes (Dance of the giants), La gran carpa de la familia Rasquachi (The great Rasquachi family big-top), and Cuatro apariciones de la Virgen de Tepeyac (Four appearances of the Virgin of Tepeyac).69 The contrast between the mitos and the actos is not as sharp as some have suggested. As Yolanda Broyles-González argues, both of these genres are premised on a critique of colonialism and on a search for alternatives to the more destructive forces of capitalism.70 Yet the mitos were a further step away from the farmworkers—few of whom identified with neo-indigenism—and thus another removal from the creativity and energy of la causa. Regardless of whether they interpreted it as the name of a once-andfuture sovereign nation, or as an allegory for cultural autonomy, activists found in Aztlán what Mary Pat Brady calls “an alternative spatial narrative” to the one embedded in the legal and cultural doctrine that governs the United States.71 Within the current dominant model of

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restrictive citizenship, the migrant subject and the citizen subject differ in their relationship to the national territory. For the citizen, the land is understood as an extension of the self, not in any tangible way, but through an abstract identification. He or she springs from the soil, and in turn the soil is imbued with the affect of citizenship. For the undocumented subject, the national territory means something quite different. It is a home, almost. He or she works, sleeps, plays, establishes family, finds friends—in short, lives and often dies within its borders. But the migrant does not belong to the soil in the way the citizen does. There is no communion between the alien and the land, at least not one that is recognized in culture or in law. And because the alien does not have fellowship with the land, he or she is not part of the triangulated relationship between the citizenry and the territory they possess. The migrant subject is a denizen, tolerated within the territory, afforded a modicum of rights, but ultimately disposable. Just as Teatro Campesino’s model of performative citizenship sought to redefine the relationship between citizen and migrant, so, too, did it look to redefine the relationship between migrant and territory. That is because the land itself means something different in the actos than it means under U.S. law. From a legal perspective, land is a lifeless commodity that can be measured, parceled out, and sold on the free market as title. Land, like labor, becomes a form of capital that gets used up in the creation of profit. Growers—at least the ones who live on their property, rather than the many absentee owners—claim to have real love for their land. They are undoubtedly sincere, but the modern conceptualization of land as raw material has done enormous damage. Industrial agriculture uses every resource at its disposal to gain control over natural processes and thus to produce a maximum yield every year. The powerful tools and techniques industrialists have come up with—among them pesticides, diesel tractors, phosphate fertilizer, intensive irrigation, hormones, and genetically modified seed—have increased output exponentially, but they have put severe strains on surrounding ecosystems.72 The system that shows such indifference to the needs of its human laborers also generally disregards the needs of nonhuman nature. Vietnam campesino (1970)—among the funniest and most unsettling skits in the entire repertoire of El Teatro Campesino—comments on the grower’s unremitting abuse of land and labor alike. The acto begins with a scene about “the Military-Agricultural Complex” in which General Defense, a representative from the Pentagon, pays a visit to the Butt Anglo farm in Salinas. (Butt Anglo is a barely disguised mockery of Bud

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Antle, a powerful California lettuce grower.) The General wants to help Butt Anglo defeat a strike in the lettuce fields, saying: “Well, your troubles are over, you ole Butt. Your Government in cooperation with the Dowe [sic] Chemical Corporation has just created a new lettuce picker.”73 The two men share an insiders’ laugh when General Defense describes how this new machine looks: “Like a Mexican about three feet tall, with arms four feet long. Runs on diesel.”74 With characteristic brashness, El Teatro Campesino highlights in this the penetration of military technology into every corner of everyday life, including the agriculture industry, where the Department of Defense and contractors like Dow Chemical have been central in developing everything from petroleum-based pesticides to aviation technology to (in more recent times) GPS systems that aid in planting. General Defense gives additional help to Butt Anglo by providing more-than-generous “welfare” payments, or “subsidies,” as Butt prefers to call them.75 During the grape strike, the notoriously spiteful Richard Nixon ordered Defense Department procurement officials to purchase boycotted grapes. Vietnam campesino makes a mockery of this “back-scratching” among elites. When Butt Anglo first makes a pitch to General Defense for lettuce, he initially quotes a price of $250,000 for fifty thousand crates. By the time negotiations are over, Defense has talked the grower “down” to a price of $1 million of taxpayers’ money.76 The second scene of the acto opens with Butt Anglo’s son “Little Butt” flying a toy airplane and “spraying pesticides from a baby powder container he holds in his free hand.”77 When Dolores Huerta shows up with the UFW Black Eagle flag and confronts Butt for poisoning the workers and the crop, the grower invokes his private-property rights and insists that she leave.78 This scene with Little Butt is one of mock comedy, but it becomes tragic near the end of the acto when Little Butt, just finished with Air Force ROTC training, begins raining bombs on campesinos in Vietnam. After a particularly sharply worded condemnation of the deception and destruction in Vietnam, the play concludes with a reference to Aztlán as an alternative mapping of world relations. One of the farmworker children addresses the audience and declares: “The war in Vietnam continues, asesinando families inocentes de campesinos. Los Chicanos mueren en la guerra, y los rancheros se hacen ricos, selling their scab products to the Pentagon. The fight is here, Raza! En Aztlán” (The war in Vietnam continues, killing innocent campesino families. Chicanos are dying in the war, and the growers are getting rich, selling their scab products to the Pentagon. The fight is here, raza! In Aztlán”).79 Several dynamics are at play in this densely confrontational moment.

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First, by explicitly linking the rhetoric of Aztlán with a condemnation of pesticides, El Teatro Campesino was here identifying itself with an emergent Chicano/a environmentalism that refused the distinction between matters of politics and matters of ecology. Second, this moment in Vietnam campesino challenged the Cold War framing of every military intervention as defense against the spread of communism. Teatro Campesino suggested instead that Vietnam was more accurately understood as a war by elites to protect global trade markets. Finally, and importantly, the young farmworker’s stirring appeal spells out in brief El Teatro Campesino’s alternative understanding of territory and its relation to citizenship. Within our existing social order, what truly binds citizens together is property: we are imagined as having signed a contract (at birth!) in which we surrender a portion of our natural liberty in order to obtain the security that government gives. This liberal doctrine, which has its origins in the writings of John Locke and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, is premised on the notion that individuals are always and everywhere competing with each other, with property as the prize.80 The actos take a different view. As I have suggested above, for El Teatro Campesino it is performance and not property that yokes together citizens. Within this representative Chicano/a model of belonging, individuals are connected to each other not because they possess certain documents granting them legal protection, but because they share a space and time. Accordingly, land is not an inert object for which individuals compete. Rather it is the stage of citizenship, a dynamic agent that to a considerable degree gives life and meaning to those who are on it. El Teatro Campesino performances enacted this philosophy. The settings for skits like Vietnam campesino, Soldado razo, Los vendidos, and the rest were sparse because the company had no money. Yet in true Chicano/a fashion, the members of El Teatro Campesino turned this poverty into wealth, using the barren stage to emphasize the lived context in which these productions took place. Whether it was on a flatbed truck along the highway in California’s San Joaquin Valley, in the union hall in Delano, at a federal building in Washington, D.C., or in Nancy, France, the land itself became part of each performance. And though the law would not and could not recognize it, for a moment that territory belonged to the actors and audiences who made the experience what it was. Every acto was in this way an allegory of a living citizenship, as well as a bold declaration that all workers, regardless of legal status, share

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ownership of what they make because they are performers. El Teatro Campesino thus echoed what César Chávez sometimes said when asked what would happen to farmworkers after the mechanization of farming. Chávez, who never forgot his family’s loss of their Arizona land during the Great Depression, reportedly said “with a glint in his eye”: “The land is the source of power! Someday we will have to get a share of the land!”81 Such militant sentiment holds special meaning in California’s Central Valley. This enormous region, though often obscured by the bright lights of Hollywood and the high-tech of Silicon Valley, is the main economic engine of the state and one of the key agricultural areas on the planet. Because of its importance to California and to the entire nation, the Central Valley has long been a political battlefield. Readers of John Steinbeck know that the area has been home for many decades to an influential progressive populism. In 1883, as part of a wave of labor militancy, Chinese laborers at Gustav Eisen’s Fresno vineyard went on strike at the peak of harvest and won the $1.50 per ton wage that white men earned.82 Chinese exclusion laws were passed to prevent this wave from destroying California agriculture, but soon the Japanese workers imported as replacements also began a pattern of labor actions in the region, including saving money to purchase land, and became competitors. Over time Sikhs, Mexicans, white “bindlemen,” and Filipinos were brought in, but no group was immune from labor agitation. In 1910 and 1911, farmworker organizers with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) engaged in and ultimately won a violent free speech battle with Fresno authorities trying to ban “soapbox” speakers from city streets.83 Two decades later and in the face of yet more violence, farmworkers in the Central Valley provided the spark for a nationwide strike movement during the Great Depression.84 The United Farm Workers and El Teatro Campesino were together inheritors of this tradition, and it continues today with organizations like the Central Valley Partnership for Citizenship, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Radio Bilingüe (Bilingual Radio), and the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Binational Indigenous Oaxacan Front). Yet despite California’s reputation as one of the bluest of the so-called blue states, the Central Valley has also been an important conservative capital.85 In fact, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that this region of the Golden State has been an important breeding ground for the antigovernment, pro-corporate ideology that today dominates the Republican Party. California’s admission into the Union was built on “free labor,” a popular nineteenth-century ideal that suggested America

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was different than Europe because here any man willing to work could enter the competitive market and get ahead.86 In the latter half of the 1800s, this siren song drew whites to the Central Valley from the Midwest and the East, but to all women and to California’s many racialized populations, the ideology of free labor was a farce: ironically portraying themselves as victims of aggressive foreigners “flooding” the region, the white working-class and its big-business allies—the latter profiting from racial division—heaped violence on communities of color and passed legislation that imprisoned, excluded, or impoverished them.87 This rhetoric of white victimization got a facelift during the New Deal and again after World War II as white conservatives grew increasingly resentful of the government’s presumed efforts to raise their taxes and redistribute the money to undeserving colored people. By the 1960s, the John Birch Society was going strong in the Central Valley, and though members of this organization often pretended to be independent of the Republican Party, come election time they and other conservatives in the region fell in line and gave considerable money, time, and votes to the GOP. Barry Goldwater owed a great deal to the Central Valley’s wealthy growers for his surprisingly strong California showing in the 1964 election. Ronald Reagan owed them even more. Prominent Fresno growers served as some of Reagan’s key advisors, and the region contributed substantial sums of money to the adept actor’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign and his later presidential campaigns. El Teatro Campesino was satirizing Reagan and his policies at a time when many people in California and across the country were fawning over the new governor’s seeming sincerity.88 They knew a performer when they saw one, and so they had fun with Reagan’s penchant for stage-managing problems. Take, for example, the skit Los vendidos [The sellouts], about a Mexican American secretary in the Reagan administration who comes to “Honest Sancho’s Used Mexican Lot” in search of “a Mexican type” that can be paraded around at official gatherings.89 First performed in 1967 at a meeting of the Brown Berets in East L.A.’s Elysian Park, the acto drew on the audience’s recollection of Reagan’s campaign swings through Latino/a neighborhoods in Southern California as part of an initiative he called Ya Basta (Enough already!). While an impressive majority seems to have recognized the GOP’s appeal to shared “family values” as pandering, nearly 25 percent of the Mexican American electorate voted for Reagan.90 The naïve secretary, who comically insists that she be referred to with the Anglicized Spanish surname “Miss JIM-enez,” is a cautionary tale to undecided voters

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about conservative efforts to undermine the electoral power of informed Latino/a voters and to camouflage the destructive effect that neoliberal policies have on minoritized communities. The skit Vietnam campesino, discussed above, makes a similar point about the now-pervasive culture of public-relations politics. When Butt Anglo complains to General Defense about the farmworkers’ union, the General suggests he come up with a derogatory name that will change public perception. The grower explains that the union movement is led by César Chávez and Larry Itliong, so General Defense yells out an idea: “The Chavez-Itliong gang! The Chong! . . . The Communist Mexican Chong!”91 Instead of dealing with issues on their merits, elites too often reduce public affairs to the most cynical and most destructive kind of theater. Their actions are a corruption of the kind of performative citizenship that Chicano/a politics imagines.

The Country and the City Over the course of this essay, I have commented on several of El Teatro Campesino’s actos as they relate to the politics of performative citizenship. In this last section, I want to offer a reading of Las dos caras del patroncito (The boss’s two faces), one of the most celebrated of the actos and in my view the sharpest. In particular, I want to study the ways in which this skit uses the notion of performative citizenship to critique the manufactured divide between country and city, a divide that helps reproduce inequality in both rural and urban zones. Las dos caras begins with an optimistic young farmworker greeting the audience members and telling them he has migrated from Mexico to California (“the land of sun and money! More sun than money”) in order to work the grape fields.92 When the boss shows up costumed in a crude pig mask and a cardboard sign reading “Patroncito” (Little Boss), he asks his employee if the farmworker has ever heard of “Cesar Ch’vez.”93 Uncertain for a moment of the correct answer, the worker reads the boss’s body language and rightly yells: “Oh no, señor! Es comunista! Y la huelga es puro pedo” (Oh no, sir! He’s a communist! And the strike is nothing but bullshit!).94 Soon the relieved patroncito lets his guard down, and before long he is confessing to the young man his desire to live as carefree as the farmworker. As the patroncito romantically describes it: I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Sometimes I sit up there in my office and think to myself: I wish I was a Mexican. . . . Just one

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of my own boys. Riding in the trucks, hair flying in the wind, feeling all that freedom, coming out here to the fields, working under the green vines, smoking a cigarette, my hands in the cool soft earth, underneath the blue skies, with white clouds drifting by, looking at the mountains, listening to the birdies sing.95 The farmworker reacts with surprise; he didn’t know he had it so good. The two men decide to play a little game. The patroncito grabs the “hat, shears, sign” of the farmworker and surrenders his own cigar, whip, and placard. The farmworker is at first hesitant to play along. After all, his survival typically hinges on his obeying the strict hierarchy of the farm system. Gradually, though, he adjusts to the new role, and once he puts on the pig mask, the transformation is complete. The stage directions explain the transformation: “Farmworker, who has his back to the audience, jerks suddenly as he puts on patroncito mask. He stands tall and turns slowly, now looking very much like a patron.”96 The two men engage in a subtly erotic sado-masochistic banter, until the boss-turnedfarmworker begins to worry the game has gone too far. He is right: the farmworker-turned-boss refuses to relinquish his newfound power. Yelling, “GIT YOUR HANDS OFFA ME, SPIC!,” the new patroncito has the old patroncito arrested by the same “Charlie the Rent-a-Fuzz” who once harassed him.97 The genius of this scene lies in its use of comedy to challenge the natural authority of the boss. Through laughter, farmworkers watching Las dos caras come to feel the arbitrary injustice of their position and to imagine a different scenario. Also ingenius is the plot’s comparison of the California-style system of modern agriculture with the chattel slavery system of the South, for while these two seem as different from each other as freedom and unfreedom, troubling parallels exist. Like the slave, the “illegal” immigrant is denied many of the basic rights of citizenship, including defense of their person, respect toward their family, and protection of their property. This is because both the slave and the illegal are subject to the law of the United States, but neither of them are subjects of the law—a split that is both cause and effect of the stigma of “social death” that accompanies their social station. In both cases, this social death is what animates the citizen. Slavery in antebellum America made the citizen a living thing; it gave life to the citizen, because it gave him—and it was him—an image of death.98 There are of course clear differences between the slave and the undocumented worker: the undocumented worker receives a wage for his work, even if a grossly insufficient

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one; the undocumented worker can leave his or her labor without fear of state reprisal, although not always; the progeny of the undocumented worker is not born into the same legal standing; also, the undocumented worker is not subject to the same constant threat of direct violence, and the undocumented worker has limited recourse to due process. These differences, though, should only serve to emphasize the fact that migrant labor continues to exist in this shadowy region between free and unfree labor. Through this historical comparison between the farmworker and the slave, Las dos caras memorably challenges the idealized image that many Americans have of farming. As I mentioned above, most of the commercial produce in California is grown by a relatively small number of high-revenue food corporations. This is not a recent development, despite a popular perception among Americans that the corporatization of agriculture began only recently. Since the 1860s and 1870s, California—and central California in particular—has been ground zero for the development of a large-scale industrial agriculture that relies on surplus labor forces, expensive technology, huge tracts of land, and enormous yield. Over time this model has been reproduced across the country and around the globe, so that today much of the world’s food is made in what Carey McWilliams once memorably called “factories in the field.”99 The organic food movement has made many people more cognizant of these conditions than we were three decades ago, but because of expensive marketing campaigns and high-powered lobbying, the public still has emotional attachments to the old-time, midwestern ideal of the small family farm. These attachments do important political work. They perpetuate what Raymond Williams has shown to be an ideological divide between “the country and the city,” and they do so at a time when advanced communication technologies might otherwise erode this powerful barrier.100 The rural and the urban need each other: at bare minimum, the country cannot live without the markets of the city, and the city cannot live without the produce of the country. Yet the two zones remain practically and culturally divided. Wrongly convinced that urban spaces are the center of national power, many city dwellers live their entire lives largely ignorant of the social and political realities of rural zones. Popular culture gives people in the country greater insight into the city than urbanites have of the country, but too many rural citizens associate urban life with misconceived ideas about filth, moral decay, and elitism. This material and ideological divide, which David Harvey helpfully calls

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the “uneven geographical development” of modernity, ultimately works to the advantage of the elite interests that govern both zones. Agriculturalists benefit because the exploitation of labor can go on hidden from view and because isolated workers cannot organize. Urban elites benefit because lower food costs make lower wages tolerable, and also because stereotypes about rural regions help obscure the integrated nature of the economy and thus defuse mass protest movements. By satirizing our mythologies about farming, El Teatro Campesino makes spectators aware of this ideological divide between country and city, and thus looks to establish new grounds for unity between residents of the two locations. This happens in Las dos caras when the patroncito responds to allegations of abuse from the farmworkers’ union by appealing to the well-worn ideology of agricultural exceptionalism. In one of the most revealing moments of the play, the grower “starts to get emotional” (according to stage directions) and tells the farmworker: Those commie bastards say I don’t know what hard work is, that I exploit my workers. But look at all them vines, boy! (Waves an arm toward the audience) Who the hell do they think planted all them vines with his bare hands? Working from sun-up to sunset! Shoving vine shoots into the ground! With blood pouring out of his fingernails. Working in the heat, the frost, the fog, the sleet!101 The patron’s anger and frustration in this scene are fueled by a perception that the government is taking his money and giving it away to lazy ingrates, all the while allowing the United Farm Workers to attack him. As he bellyaches to the farmworker: “You sure as hell ain’t got my problems, I’ll tell you that. Taxes, insurance, supporting all them bums on welfare. You don’t have to worry about none of that.”102 Clearly the grower has erected his sense of who he is upon a narrative of him against the world, and he takes refuge in a belief that outsiders— be they union organizers, government officials, the poor, or city-slicker liberals—can’t possibly understand how difficult his life is. The patroncito’s narrative would indeed be sad if it were true, but as with much of big business today, the agriculture industry is only complex to the extent that executives make it so in order to hide profits and exaggerate the value of their positions. Herein lies the true beauty of El Teatro Campesino’s minimalist aesthetic. By focusing not on the inward psychology of each character, but rather on his or her external role in a scripted drama, the actos foreground the contradictions that permeate our economy and our society. The trappings of power and money instill in the patroncito

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a belief that his wealth is an extension of who he is, rather than the reverse. The comic irony, though, is that the grower is one who benefits from government handouts, among them free land inherited through the Homestead Act, generous farm subsidies, federal irrigation projects, and immigration policies that supply a surplus pool of cheap labor. And while the patroncito likes to keep his shoes unshined as a marker of his country independence, Las dos caras shows him to be deeply implicated in regional, national and even international flows of capital. As he boasts to the farmworker when they first meet, “I’m an important man, boy! Bank of America, University of California, Safeway stores—I got a hand in all of ’em.”103 This offhanded remark by the patroncito betrays an important truth about the neoliberal economics ascending into power in the 1960s: even as the country and the city were being transformed by changing ideas of public and private, each geography retained a “possessive investment in whiteness” (to use George Lipsitz’s phrase) that gave unearned advantages to the majority while disadvantaging minorities. Las dos caras lampoons this dynamic in the patroncito’s humorous follow-up to his monologue about the farmworker’s romantic existence. After hearing the boss ask, “Who the hell do they think planted all them vines with his own bare hands?,” the farmworker eagerly replies, “You, patron, you!” One expects the patroncito to agree, but apparently he thinks so little of the farmworker that he decides to tell the damaging truth: “Naw, my grandfather, he worked his ass off out here. BUT I inherited, and it’s all mine.”104 This line is brief, but it is razor-sharp. Boosters often represent California’s Central Valley as an extension of America’s heartland, a region of patriotism, family values, and hard work that is closely associated with notions of whiteness. Las dos caras punctures this inflated rhetoric, comically emphasizing the crucial role that inheritance and the exploitation of multiracial labor has played in producing the tremendous wealth of the Central Valley. The result is a very different picture of central California. Instead of the dominant image of the region as a place where whites can and do find refuge from the modernity’s mongrel immorality, Las dos caras represents it as a place in which disempowered masses are played against each other for the benefit of a powerful elite. The Central Valley becomes the setting, in other words, for drama, and by using it as such, El Teatro Campesino refers our attention as spectators to the histories of race-based and class-based conflict that too often get ignored in the Chamber-of-Commerce rendering. During the eighteenth century,

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Indians enslaved on and around the Spanish missions sometimes fled to the Central Valley. Occasionally they were successful in establishing marooned communities; often they were tracked down and either killed or reenslaved. In the nineteenth century, successive waves of impoverished white, Chinese, Japanese, and Sikh laborers were imported to the region in order to replace the dwindling Indian labor force. Some of these laborers returned to their native lands scarcely richer than they had left; others settled permanently and helped contribute to the Central Valley’s rich diversity. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Spanish-speakers and speakers of indigenous languages from Mexico and Central America have made the difficult journey northward to work in what is now one of the largest agricultural empires on the globe. These and other narratives, while not referenced explicitly in the repertoire of El Teatro Campesino, together form the backstory for the group’s remapping of central California. Language and language use is vital to this remapping, just as it is to the broader politics of performative citizenship. The Central Valley region has a long and rich history of multilingualism. Prior to European arrival, the territory that is today California was home to one of the most diverse collections of indigenous languages of any region on the continent. European colonizers stamped out these languages as part of their efforts to win the fertile land, and as a result, the languages of the Miwoks, Soshone, Ohlone, and Gabrielinos were replaced by Russian, Spanish, French, German, and English, with Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, and Tagalog also well represented. Each of these languages constitutes an essential part of California history, and despite efforts to quash them—particularly during the so-called Americanization campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s—each language persists today. (Sadly, all but a few of the indigenous languages are now extinct, and those that survive are endangered.) El Teatro Campesino took a special interest in the place of Spanish on the soil of California. Beginning with the founding of the Franciscan missions in 1769 and continuing until the American conquest of 1848, Spanish was the language of dominant authority in California. As English gradually established itself as the language of trade in the 1830s and 1840s, Mexican elites in Alta California worked desperately to prevent Spanish from going the way of the many indigenous languages they had abolished. They founded Spanish-language media, including Francisco Ramírez’s noteworthy El clamor público in Los Angeles. They established bilingual schools. Most remarkably, the eight californios who participated in the forty-eight-member Constitutional Convention of 1949

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managed to insert language that required all government documents to be printed in English and in Spanish, making California a multilingual government at its founding.105 These efforts failed, although it should be said that in failure they achieved a symbolic victory that means a great deal now that powerful interest groups are trying to rewrite the history of California and of the United States in English only. Commentators on U.S. social history have long suggested that “foreign” languages inevitably fade away as immigrants assimilate into America. The reality is that it has taken tremendous legislative and cultural effort to erase languages other than English from the official history of the nation and to depict them instead as recent arrivals—intrusions even—on our monolingual past. Spanish has been a particular irritant, perhaps because the United States shares with a Spanish-speaking country one of the largest and most porous land borders in the world, and must therefore rely on ideology to shore up a national identity it cannot maintain in practice. This anxiety about Spanish has old roots. Lousiana in 1812 passed the first “English Only” law in U.S. history in order to gain admission to the union.106 To its credit, the United States has never had an official language, but the prospect of polyglot Louisiana becoming a state without a clear commitment to English dominance must have made local and national elites uncomfortable. A similar dynamic played itself out in California decades later. In 1855, just six years after the policy had been established, state legislators anxious about the nativist influence of the Know-Nothing Party stopped printing government laws in Spanish.107 From this point forward, Spanish dwelt within the California imagination largely as part of what Carey McWilliams famously called a “Spanish Fantasy heritage” in which the charming world of the old californios is romanticized in art and architecture. Meanwhile, flesh-and-bone Spanish-speakers are marginalized and demeaned through legislation like Proposition 63, which made English the official language of California, or Proposition 227, which banned bilingual education in the state. This tendency to distinguish between a mythologized Spanish past and Latina/o cultures in the present was only possible because of an ideological sleight-of-hand that separated migrant cultures from migrant labor.108 In the neoliberal economy of the postwar United States, commodities are able to move with increasing freedom across borders, while persons are subject to increasing regulation. Similarly, the labor of migrant subjects is welcomed, but the cultures of migrant subjects are not. Even in our age of multiculturalism, migrants and their children

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are given the message by schools, courts, legislatures, and other state institutions that in order to succeed they must surrender their native tongue in favor of English. Some refuse this message: there are specific Latino/a communities in Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, New York, and California that have high rates of Spanish retention, despite stubborn cultural and institutional curbs on multilingualism. Others accept this message, and in so doing they wittingly or unwittingly reinforce a traditional dichotomy between English as the public idiom of commerce on one hand, and Spanish as the private idiom of affect on the other. The distinction is foolish. English is as rich in poetry as any other language, and Spanish is hardly outside the global system of exchange. Nevertheless, the distinction has broad credibility in the United States and in Latin America. As Lynn Di Iorio Sandín argues, these attempts at “killing Spanish” made by Spanish-speakers looking to fit in generate often unacknowledged feelings of anger and sadness about the high cultural price one must pay to belong in the United States.109 Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory still resonates in this regard: the scene in which two nuns visit young Richard’s home and urge his parents to never again speak Spanish to their children is as vivid a representation of the pain and the impossibility of killing Spanish as you can find in U.S. Latina/o literature.110 One of the many reasons why the actos are as meaningful today as they were when they premiered in 1965 is because El Teatro Campesino refused to let Spanish die. By code-switching between English and Spanish, El Teatro Campesino asserted the power of Spanish as a private and a public idiom. The intellectual implications of this move were far-reaching. By acknowledging Spanish-speaking audiences, El Teatro Campesino challenged the restrictive equation between the English language and American soil, enacting instead a model of performative citizenship in which every language spoken is an official language. The actos also reversed the language hierarchy that governs U.S. culture, for at a performance of Las dos caras or any other skit, monolingual speakers of English could not help but feel their linguistic handicaps. (For many of them it was probably a new and uncomfortable experience.) Migrant subjects, meanwhile, were advantaged by their multilingualism and allowed to celebrate rather than make apologies for it. In choosing theater as a medium for organizing migrant farmworkers, El Teatro Campesino was drawing on a profound truth: all migrant laborers are actors, pretending to be content with their lot not for the sake of applause but for the sake of a day’s wages. No matter how poor their

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work conditions, no matter how obvious the exploitation, immigrants are neither expected nor allowed to be angry, for to be angry is to be ungrateful to America for the opportunity to live the American dream, even when that dream turns out to be elusive. Yet anger is a central feature of the migrant experience, a symptom of the sadness of being uprooted and the despair of being trapped in a physically demanding, poorly paid job or being trapped in the underclass, poorly paid and with little way out. (Migrant anger extends even to the children of immigrants, who live under the long shadow cast by their parents’ social death.) Migrants must learn to act content, to “put on” a farmworker persona by showing extreme deference, being simple in speech, and by staying quiet. It is a tradition that has old roots, going back to the eighteenth century, when Indian farmworkers throughout California developed strategies for placating Spanish authorities while preserving as best they could their religious and cultural traditions. These everyday performances allow the migrant subject to survive, but the suppression of rage and sadness takes an extreme toll on the farmworker. El Teatro Campesino gave space and a language for migrant workers to vent their rage and to experience some relief. There are moments in Las dos caras when the suppressed rage of the migrant subject is visible, as when the farmworker almost cuts off the finger of the patron. Such moments allow the farmworker audience to see their own subjectivity reflected on the stage and thus to realize they are not alone. By then mocking the patron on stage and making him the butt (often literally) of numerous jokes, El Teatro Campesino also sought to lessen the fear that many farmworkers had of the boss. The patron projects his own belief that his power is rooted in the natural order of things, and often the farmworker comes to believe in this inevitability. Through a series of dramatic reversals, Las dos caras sought to remind farmworkers of what on some level they already know: that their inferior position in the world is caused not by their own inadequacies, but rather by a corrupt system. El Teatro Campesino’s goal in this acto, as in all actos, was not to replace white supremacy with Chicano/a supremacy. Its goal was to revolutionize the system in a way that made inferior and superior, citizen and alien, entirely obsolete.

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After Words: Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo and the Evolution of Chicano/a Cultural Politics

Ignacio García, a participant-turned-historian of the Chicano movement, argues in an often-cited essay from 1996 that the field of Chicano/a studies must decide whether to continue its descent into irrelevance, or to recover its activist roots by reaffirming the principles of the 1969 “Plan de Santa Barbara.” His is a typical movement elegy, with sincere mourning over the lost “militancy” of the 1960s and 1970s, juxtaposed alongside frustration with a perceived “growing conservatism and narcissistic attitude” among students and faculty in the 1980s and after.1 García blames a number of forces for this decline, but notable among them is what the author calls a “lesbian-feminism” among “gender nationalists” who “find the lurking ‘macho’ in every Chicano scholarly work,” and who “have even gone as far as promoting the idea that homosexuality is an integral part of Chicano culture.”2 In an essay that has moments of insight into the challenges of institutionalization, this turn is strangely conspiratorial. Things only get stranger in the footnotes. García calls out the Claremont Colleges, Berkeley, UCLA, and other universities as “hotbeds of feminist discourse.” He accuses Chicana feminists of reducing the Chicano/a family to “single females, or single-parent families led by females” with “very little vibrancy . . . beyond the mother-daughter relationship.”3 For an essay premised on the need for unity, García spends a surprising amount of time fighting needless generational wars and worrying over the families that women make for themselves. As Lorena Oropeza notes, García’s take on feminism is a minority opinion.4 More common, though, and ultimately more worthy of scrutiny, is García’s

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understanding of the relationship between feminism and cultural nationalism. His anger at women—lesbians especially—for destroying the Chicano movement is predicated on a belief that feminism and nationalism were at odds with each other during the Chicano movement, and that in some crucial sense feminism won the day. Chicana feminists have also at times subscribed to this conflict narrative, though they of course feel very differently about the outcome. Norma Alarcón, for example, tells a similar story in her essay “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘The’ Native Woman.” Commenting on the evolution of progressive Chicano/a politics, Alarcón says that “in the 1980s, a more visible Chicana feminist intervention has given new life to a stalled Chicano movement.”5 Implicit in Alarcón’s remark is the notion that the relatively high profile of writers and activists such as Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Dolores Huerta, Cherríe Moraga, and Alarcón herself is somehow a thing apart from the movement politics of the 1960s and its panoply of male leaders, including César Chávez, Corky Gonzales, Reies López Tijerina, and José Angel Gutiérrez. But as widespread as it is, this agonistic narrative does not do justice to the ways in which nationalism and feminism informed each other during the 1960s and 1970s. Chicana feminists were deeply influenced by the nationalist ideologies that guided the Chicano movement. Chicanismo, a spirit of cultural pride and unity that was central to nationalism, did many things for the women who identified with it: it allowed them to feel comfortable in their own skin, despite dominant social codes that marked their racialized bodies as inferior; it gave them a basis for pride in cultural practices often marked as deviant, and in doing so helped them see through the ideology of white superiority; it allowed them to connect with their family as more than a daughter, wife, granddaughter, sister, or niece; and it gave them opportunities to be involved in the public sphere as speakers, writers, organizers, and artists.6 Perhaps because we have a historical template for thinking about the impact of nationalism on feminism, and perhaps also because we are quick to look elsewhere for the origins of women’s activism, the influence of cultural nationalism on Chicana politics is widely appreciated by those of us who study such things. Far less recognized, but crucial in every way, was the influence of feminism on cultural nationalism. Chicana feminism has been understood by friend and foe alike as a postscript to the Chicano movement, a delayed response to the presumed failures of a male-oriented and male-driven Chicano nationalism. This narrative is one we need to revise, though, because it ignores how

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feminist activism helped bring the Chicano movement into existence. It also underestimates the many ways in which feminism has sustained the Chicano movement long after its rumored demise in the 1970s. Though it may seem an unlikely destination, one place we can look to begin to revise these narratives is in the Chicana fiction tradition that has taken shape over the last several decades, as this tradition represents both the extension and the remaking of Chicano/a activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo, first published by Knopf in 2002, is a particularly valuable touchstone for this kind of thinking because it is a novel that thematizes in compelling ways the complex historical dynamics between nationalism and feminism. Her beautifully original coming-of-age story is a novelistic testament to ways in which feminism has transformed the Chicano movement over the past several decades, and in so doing has created a vital space in which the preservation of cultural tradition does not have to come at the cost of personal freedom.

Genealogies of Chicana Feminism The last three decades have seen the emergence of a canon of short stories and novels that look to represent the distinctive histories and experiences of Mexican American women. Though united in purpose, this Chicana fiction tradition is diverse, both at the level of form and content. Many of the texts in this canon are written in a popular style that pursues a broad audience through more-or-less linear plotting, flawed-butconfident female protagonists, a comic thread, occasional Spanish (often translated for the reader), and some aspect of romance. Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street—the book that brought Chicana writing to the attention of large publishing houses—is written in this style, as are many of the works by Ana Castillo, Reyna Grande, Denise Chávez, Yxta Maya Murray, and Demetria Martinez. Other texts are more experimental. Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus uses a complex Faulknerian narrative voice to develop the iconic character Estrella and her migrant family. Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams brings together elements of memoir, manifesto, poetry, ethnography, and fiction to explore the sadness and the pleasure of lesbian sexuality in a Texas town.7 Of course, hard-and-fast distinctions are impossible and unnecessary. Nearly all of the short stories and novels in this Chicana fiction tradition are experimenting on some level with form, since the themes and experiences they are representing do not always fit within existing literary modes. The glue that holds them together is a desire to understand the

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particularity of Chicana experience, and also a commitment to social justice. Several factors have come together over the past thirty years to create the conditions that made this tradition possible. Affirmative action programs have opened doors that were previously closed to Chicanas, allowing for greater numbers of women to attend college and to enroll in prestigious MFA programs at the University of Iowa, the University of California, Irvine, and elsewhere. The multicultural remaking of the American canon—a continued legacy, by the way, of 1960s activism—has given aspiring Mexican American writers the confidence they need to transform the raw material of their lives into great literature. It has also established a reliable readership, since an increasing number of college students of all racial backgrounds are being introduced to Chicana literature in the classroom. Amid massive changes in the book business, publishers large and small are looking to the expanding Latino/a population, with its subset of new professionals, as a potential growth market. A number of major publishing houses have gone so far as to establish Hispanic-oriented imprints. They hope not only to reach Latinos/as in the United States, but also Latin American readers who have family or other kinds of affiliation with the United States.8 The curious thing about the success that Chicana feminist writing has enjoyed in recent decades is that it occurs at the very period described by Armando Navarro and others as a time of defeat and indifference for Mexican America. The movement elegies that frequently appear in discussions of Mexican American politics suggest that the decades since the election of Ronald Reagan have been a lost time for progressive Chicano/a activism. Yet this same period saw a number of feminist writers getting their work published both in smaller independent presses such as Third Woman Press, Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, Arte Público, and also in larger houses such as Penguin, Knopf, and Norton.9 An argument might be made that these works are only popular because they abandoned the movement’s commitment to progressive politics. This cynical line of argument repeats the malinche refrain of earlier decades, and it ignores the obvious signs that contemporary Chicana fiction is built on many of the social and aesthetic principles that guided Chicano/a activism in the 1960s and 1970s. The novel was not one of the Chicano movement’s major artistic genres, mainly because it requires considerable writing time and a strong editorial commitment from publishers. José Antonio Villareal, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Richard Vasquez, and John Rechy wrote novels and novelistic autobiographies,

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but as writers they were sometimes ambivalent about their association with the Chicano movement. Berta Ornelas and Isabella Rios each wrote novels that fit within the tradition of Chicana fiction, but Come Down from the Mound (1975) and Victuum (1976) were idiosyncratic works and were largely ignored.10 With relatively few models to draw from, Cisneros, Viramontes, Gaspar de Alba, Castillo, and other writers relied on a combination of the training they received in MFA programs, fellowship programs, community networks of support, and their own willpower to complete their work. Their achievement has been considerable: not until the success of these books—beginning with the publication of Sandra Cisneros’s Women Hollering Creek and the rerelease of The House on Mango Street in 1991—were the experiences of Mexicans in America recognized as a subject worthy of fiction by the literary establishment. Though recognition by the dominant culture industry is of course not the highest aim of political struggle, it does represent an important victory for Chicano/a cultural politics. But if the Chicana fiction tradition and, more broadly, Chicana feminism itself has indeed carried forward many of the core political and artistic aims of the Chicano movement, then why is the Chicano movement so often wrapped in mourning? The question is complex, but the principal reason lies in the fact that Chicana feminism is often narrated by allies and opponents alike as a corollary of the Chicano movement. According to one typical narrative, Chicana feminism was born at the 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation conference, when a group of attendees gathered in a “Woman’s Caucus” to discuss the meaning of women’s liberation for Mexican Americans. After a heated series of debates, the women issued a resolution saying that feminism had no place in the Chicano movement because it created disunity and distracted from the more pressing issue of racial injustice. For them, Aztlán as a nationalist utopia included women’s liberation. It was only later, after men failed to adhere to nationalism’s promise of freedom, that women parted ways with the Chicano movement and created an autonomous Chicana movement. As early as 1977, it was possible to periodize 1968 to 1972 as “the ‘peak’ years of the Chicano Student Movement,” and 1970 to 1972 as “the years in which Chicana awareness emerged.”11 Chicana feminists and traditional nationalists did sometimes clash. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, there were individuals—often but not always men—who mocked “women’s lib” and attacked it as a threat to the family of la raza. The unsigned mock public service announcement

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that ran in the summer 1970 issue of the popular L.A. periodical Con Safos is a vivid example of this reactionary perspective. Calling on readers to “Join Womens Lib” [sic], the cartoon features an ancient couple looking directly at the viewer as the frail woman haltingly shouts out “YA . . . BASTA CON . . . CON ESTE . . . . MENTADO SEX” (Enough already of this sex!).12 This comic can perhaps be dismissed as lighthearted teasing, but anxieties about feminism and about the roles of women within the movement sometimes led to interpersonal conflict, and even broke up organizations. In May of 1971, a group of approximately five hundred Chicanas gathered in Houston for La Conferencia de Mujeres por La Raza. Organizers wanted to create coalitions among women from different regions and to discuss common concerns, including welfare rights, abortion, and job discrimination. The meeting splintered, though, when a faction of strict nationalists accused the organizers of selling out to white feminists.13 In 1973, two feminists who had drawn on the Black Panther model to create the Barrio Free Clinic in East Los Angeles split from the ultranationalist Brown Berets. Gloria Arellanes and Andrea Sánchez were angry because they saw a situation in which they were doing all the work, while male leaders in the organization took credit.14 Participants and commentators have sometimes described these tensions as symptoms of an inherent conflict between nationalism and feminism, but they were in truth part of a larger debate about the role of gender and sexuality within an imagined Chicano/a nation. George Mariscal has shown that the Chicano movement contained within it several strands of nationalist thought.15 At times these different ideologies complemented each other, while at other times they were competitors. Socialists, for example, extended Stalin’s interpretation of blacks in the United States as an oppressed “community of culture” to include Chicanos/as.16 Within this perspective, the Chicano/a nation (like all nations) was a stage in the march of history toward a communist society. Cultural nationalists, on the other hand, tended to look to the past rather than the future for their inspiration. Often rejecting Marxism as another gringo ideology, they insisted that the Chicano nation should be reconstituted out of the practices and beliefs that had been displaced by Anglo modernity. Traditionalists rejected the promise of integration into U.S. society, sometimes even calling for the creation of an independent nation of Aztlán in the region that had been ceded to the United States after the Mexican-American War. (Comparisons were occasionally drawn to the contemporaneous disputes in Quebec and Palestine.)

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Narratives that frame Chicana feminism as a by-product of the Chicano movement are premised on the idea that feminist activism was a response to the failures of Chicano nationalism. The logic of these narratives suggests that if Chicano nationalism had included women within its orbit, then Chicana feminism would have been unnecessary. Nationalism, though, always includes women, for every nation is governed by a model of gender and sexuality. The only real question is whether this model will tend toward egalitarianism and openness, or toward hierarchy and enclosure. During the 1960s and 1970s, Chicano/a politics was dominated by a conservative nationalism that idealized a family structure with sharply delineated gender roles.17 Men were regarded as the leaders of their immediate family and the family of la raza. Described as victims of a racist society that emasculated them, they were charged with protecting their kin, providing for them, and representing them in the public sphere. A woman’s commitment to her people was reflected in her willingness to reproduce the Chicano nation through sexual availability and child rearing, and also through the maintenance of religious and ethnic traditions in the home. Only a handful of people in the 1960s and 1970s would likely have expressed unconditional support for these gender conventions. Government policies and cultural norms surrounding the family were shifting dramatically during this period, and, as a result, many people held contradictory ideas about what it meant to be a man or a woman. (On this score, things aren’t much different today than they were forty years ago.) Nevertheless, evidence of this sexual division of labor at work within Chicano movement politics is easy to come by. As Richard T. Rodríguez has demonstrated, the visual arts and the literature of the Chicano movement frequently represent the male-headed, heterosexual family as the emblem of the Chicano nation.18 Social projects dedicated to the reconstruction of a supposedly more authentic Chicano manhood were quite common. Members of the Brown Berets, for example, claimed it as their duty to protect the people from economic exploitation and police harassment by maintaining a paramilitary presence in the barrio. Though their organization did some good, it was ultimately brought down by an abusive hierarchy and chauvinist attitudes—with a predicable assist from J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO.19 Another example of this masculine recuperation was the revival of the zoot-suit-wearing pachuco, a defiant icon of the youth subcultures of the 1930 and 1940s.20 These projects may indeed have been driven by a sincere desire to restore forms of manhood that were under assault,

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but other less revolutionary dynamics were also involved. Though it was pitched as oppositional, conservative nationalism’s idealization of the male-headed Chicano household was entangled in the false nostalgia for traditional families that Elaine Tyler May analyzes as a pervasive U.S. response to Cold War security threats.21 Women who wanted to contribute to el Movimiento on their own terms were angered and disheartened by this cult of Chicana domesticity. Many of them had been raised by strong, independent women, and rightly understood conservative nationalism as an invented tradition that did not align easily with Mexican American history.22 In her history of Los Angeles’s multiethnic Left, Laura Pulido tells the paradigmatic story of Magdalena Mora, a leader in the socialist organization El Centro de Acción Social y Autónomo (The Center for Autonomous Social Action). Faced with condescension and intimidation by some of the men, Mora fought at considerable emotional expense to be part of the intellectual life of the group and to hold positions of influence.23 Conservative nationalism had no way of accounting for the fact that women like Mora belonged to a different strand of Chicano/a nationalism, one that predated the Chicano movement and that included women and women’s rights as part of its political vision. The historian Emma Pérez has written a genealogy of this “third space feminism-in-nationalism” that begins not in Denver at the 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation conference or at any other movement event, but rather in Mexico during the Revolution. In 1916, Governor Salvador Alvarado convened two feminist congresses in Mérida, capital of the southern state of Yucatán. A socialist with presidential ambitions, Alvarado hoped the meetings would shore up support among women in his state, and also prove his liberal credentials. According to Pérez, the middle-class educators who made up most of the assembly were united in their desire to improve women’s lives, but they disagreed on how to get there: conservatives advocated a soft approach that focused on enlightening men at a young age; moderates called for concrete reforms within the system; and more radical voices called for the franchise, divorce rights, and sex education.24 Pérez draws special attention to the involvement of Hermila Galindo, a writer and activist responsible for some of the more controversial proposals. Galindo was focused on the condition of women in Mexico, but her thought reflected a cosmopolitan mix of European, U.S., and indigenous perspectives.25 This mix, or mestizaje, is precisely why Galindo fits within the genealogy of Chicana feminism. Though they are often interpreted as such, the words “Chicana” and “Chicano” do not reference

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biology or even custom. Above all, these words denote a progressive political subjectivity born out of the proximity—geographical and otherwise—between the world’s largest nation-state and its poorer neighbor. (“So far from God, so close to the United States,” as Porfirio Díaz sardonically described Mexico.) Galindo would never have described herself as Chicana; the word at that time and place, when used at all, was a term of working-class derision. Hers, though, was a border-crossing politics in the best sense of Chicano/a. La Mujer Moderna (The modern woman), a journal that Galido edited and disseminated throughout Mexico, drew inspiration north to south from the American suffrage movement.26 South to north, the Yucatán congresses became part of a Mexican feminist tradition that impacted sex and gender politics in the United States, both in the early decades of the twentieth century, and in the 1960s and 1970s. Pérez rightly emphasizes that the lines connecting Mexican feminism to Chicano/a nationalism are not straight. Borrowing Foucault’s metaphor of history as archaeology, she argues that instead of direct causeand-effect, we must be attentive to more subtle points of convergence. The labor activism that intensified among Mexican Americans in the 1920s and 1930s is one such point. Yucatán feminism had important links to the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party), a leftist organization that started as an opposition party to Porfirio Díaz and later evolved into an internationalist labor movement. Pérez notes that the writings of PLM leader Ricardo Flores Magón had influenced the political thought of Salvador Alvarado before Alvarado became governor. Magón’s gender politics were complicated: he expressed a commitment to women’s rights, but he also held the conservative belief that women best served the revolution as noble wives and daughters.27 After fleeing Mexico in 1904, Magón and several other PLM leaders lived in Canada and the United States. In 1910, the group settled in Los Angeles, where they continued to publish their popular journal Regeneración until Magón’s arrest in 1918. Now little more than a footnote in the official histories of the United States and Mexico, the magonistas helped build a progressive populist tradition on both sides of the border. Among the many women and men who were impacted by this tradition was Emma Tenayuca, a prominent Texas labor leader and an inspiration to Chicano/a nationalists of the post–World War II moment. Tenayuca was born and raised in San Antonio’s working-class westside barrio at a time of intense labor and cultural activism among Mexicans in Texas.28 A precocious girl who loved reading, she was influenced by

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her books, by her grandfather’s commitment to social justice, and also by the political energy circulating amongst the people who gathered at Milam Park.29 (Tenayuca’s bibliography is also discussed in chapter 2.) In 1936, as part of what Alicia Camacho Schmidt calls a “transborder social movement,” Emma Tenayuca and her colleague María Solís Sager traveled to Mexico City for union organizing training from the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (Mexican Workers’ Confederation).30 In 1937 she joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and in 1938 she led the strike of approximately seven thousand workers in San Antonio’s sweatshop pecan-shelling industry. Tenayuca was hated by city leaders and adored by workers for her leadership in the pecan action. Difficulties remained, but Local 172 and its allies were able to secure modest union benefits. The San Antonio mobilization of 1938 also strengthened community bonds and laid foundations for later political initiatives. Stalin’s signing of the Soviet-German Nonagression Pact in 1939 marked the beginning of the end of Tenayuca’s faith in the Communist Party. She formally resigned from the party in 1946, but she remained committed to progressive politics. Her influence on the Chicano movement began not in the 1960s but in the 1930s, particularly with the 1939 publication of “The Mexican Question in the Southwest.”31 Cowritten with her collaborator and husband, Homer Brooks, this theoretical essay asks whether the Mexican people residing in the borders of the United States constitute a colonized nation. Tenayuca and Brooks conclude that they do not. The authors say that Mexicans in the United States lack “territorial and economic community,” two criteria required by Stalin’s definition in “Marxism and the National and Colonial Question.”32 However, Tenayuca and Brooks conclude that regardless of generation, Mexicans in America are “one people” because they share “a common historical background and are bound by a common culture, language and communal life.”33 Historian Mario T. García contends that “The Mexican Question in the Southwest” reflects a Popular Front desire to fight global fascism by aligning with the U.S. welfare state and its allies.34 The clear implication of Tenayuca and Brooks’s argument is that the “American bourgeoisie” has a moral obligation to respect the civil rights of Mexicans in America. Emma Tenayuca’s life and her writing helped lay the groundwork for the Chicano movement. During the 1960s and 1970s, movement activists popularized the use of the word “Aztlán” as the name of a Chicano/a nation. A revanchist minority wanted to break away from

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the United States and become a sovereign nation recognized by the United Nations, but the vast majority interpreted “Aztlán” as a metaphor of social belonging, the “common culture, language and communal life” that Tenayuca marked out. Also influential was Tenayuca’s commitment to building cross-ethnic and transnational coalitions. She understood that Mexicans were being pitted against Chicanos/as (along with other members of the working class) in order to steal profits and to paper over inequality within the United States. Her partnership with recent migrants to Texas, with the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos in Mexico City, and with white and black activists in the CPUSA was a model for later generations of Chicano/a activists. Postwar redbaiting had nearly obliterated the collective memory of prewar activism, but Américo Paredes, Bert Corona, Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, and other respected leaders were able to span the formidable divide through education and example. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana feminists were quick to acknowledge the influence of women like Tenayuca. She too had been cruelly accused of race treason, but her contributions to the Mexican American communities in Texas were irrefutable.35 Conservative nationalists, though, studiously ignored the role that prewar feminist traditions on both sides of the border played in the formation of Chicano/a nationalism. Alicia Schmidt Camacho argues that the loss of feminist organizers to the Cold War politics “made the resurgence of feminism activism during the 1960s appear new and unprecedented to Mexican American and migrant social movements.” This forgetting, which was amplified by conservative nationalism’s reassertion of male authority, has also made the feminist and queer activism of the last thirty years seem like a departure from the Chicano movement, rather than its expansion. To recognize the movement’s debt to feminism is to understand the tension within Chicano/a nationalism between conservative and progressive perspectives on sex and gender. To understand this tension is, in turn, to see that the Chicano movement did not die with the election of Ronald Reagan; it simply evolved. Examining the events in Yucatán at the start of the twentieth century and the career of women like Emma Tenayuca suggest that those of us who are concerned about progressive politics in the United States and beyond deserve richer and more sustainable stories about the Chicano movement. The place to go for them, of course, is to our storytellers, and few are better than Sandra Cisneros.

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Caramelo Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo, first published by Knopf in 2002, is the coming-of-age story of Celaya Reyes, the seventh child of a Mexicanborn Chicano father and a U.S.-born Chicana mother. Celaya narrates her own life in the first person, from her birth in Chicago to her transplantation in San Antonio during her adolescence, with frequent road trips to Mexico for vacations, deaths, and other familial reasons in between. This description does justice to the broad arc of the narrative, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to capturing the humor and the history that Cisneros places around Celaya’s story. Caramelo does not begin at the beginning. The narrative starts when Celaya is an adolescent, and the Reyes family is taking its annual summer trip to Mexico City to visit Awful Grandmother, the matriarch of the clan. After a telenovela-style family fight in Acapulco that is too good for summary, the story goes back to before Celaya’s birth (“When I Was Dirt”), to the time when the girl’s great-grandparents and grandparents have their lives upended by the Mexican Revolution. Following this interlude, the narrative then returns to Celaya, carrying her across several years from Acapulco, to Chicago, to her new home in San Antonio, and finally to the celebration of her parent’s thirtieth wedding anniversary at the Postal Workers’ Union Hall. The book includes a guest appearance from Señor Wences, comic footnotes about gentrification in Chicago and other topics, a playful chronology of the history between the United States and Mexico, and song lyrics by the great vocalist Agustín Lira—all done in a style that echoes eighteenth-century picaresque novels, Mexican classics like Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the historical imagination of Toni Morrison, and, perhaps most importantly, Spanish-language telenovelas (soap operas). Cisneros’s House on Mango Street justly made her famous in the world of American letters. Caramelo, though, is her masterpiece. Even though the book was published long after the supposed death of the Chicano movement, Caramelo contains several clues that reveal its deep connection to the progressive Chicano/a politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Told as it is from the perspective of a young girl lost in the details of her playthings, her family, and her imagination, the narrative is blissfully only half-aware of its chronology. Celaya, though, has on the walls of her Chicago apartment a poster of the Jackson 5, which debuted in 1968, and another of the film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which came out that same year.36 The narrator refers back to “the recent storm

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of ’68,” all of which indicates that the climax of the novel takes place in 1969 and 1970, the apex of the Chicano movement as it is traditionally dated (293). Celaya herself does not belong to any Chicano/a organizations, and neither do any of her siblings. But the Chicano movement is “in the air,” influencing those who are not involved in it and even those who may not know about it. Cisneros gives a nod to this influence in one of the novel’s many humorous vignettes. The Reyes family is on their way back to Chicago after moving the Awful Grandmother out of her home in Mexico City. They make a stop in San Antonio, where they meet up with Marcelino Ordoñez, “a little rooster of a guy in dark glasses” who “talks like a beatnik, a cowboy, or Dean Martin or something” (277). Mars, as he is called, is a Chicano from West Texas who got Celaya’s father out of a jam during World War II. On leave from the U.S. Army, Inocencio Reyes found himself stranded on a park bench in New Orleans after being pickpocketed on a train bound for Texas. Mars gave the soldier food, money, and a new train ticket, because, as he put it, “we’re raza [kin] . . . we’re familia [family]. And familia, like it or nor, for richer or poorer, familia always gots to stick together, bro.” After Celaya’s father retells this story to his family, something unexpected happens: “Mars does the funky raza handshake with Father, like Chicano power, and Father, who is always ranting and raving about Chicanos, the same Father who calls Chicanos exagerados, vulgarones, zoot-suiting, wild-talking, mota-smoking, forgot-they-wereMexican-Mexicans, surprises us all. Father handshakes the funky handshake back” (281). This lighthearted moment is itself a kind of raza handshake, the insider greeting that Chicanos and Chicanas sometimes used with each other to show that they were “down.” Cisneros includes it to remind her readers that Mexicans in America and Mexicans in Mexico need to help each other out, and also to acknowledge the impact of 1960s and 1970s Chicano/a activism on her narrative. Of particular importance to Caramelo is Chicana feminism’s coupling of sexual and racial equality: as did activists before her, Cisneros is writing back to a version of machismo that insists that women have a political responsibility to preserve the culture, even if it comes at the expense of their personal happiness. Celaya realizes early in her life that being born female means getting less attention, less freedom, less respect. She was at first a “disappointment” to her father, who exclaimed “¡Otra vieja! Ahora, ¿cómo la voy a cuidar?” upon first seeing his daughter (231).37 (She would soon become his consentida, his darling child, but Celaya never stops wrestling with

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her father’s condescension.) A student of language, Celaya makes a mental note when the Awful Grandmother says she loves her children all the same. The matriarch refers to her children as hijos, which the narrator explains “means sons and children all at once.” When Celaya asks about the woman’s daughter, her aunt, “the Awful Grandmother gives me that look, as if I’m a pebble in her shoe” (29). (Later, a priest congratulates Inocencio Reyes for his good fortune in having seven sons, but as Celaya explains, “Father means children, not simply boys, but I don’t think Father Ginter understands” [319].) Celaya resents the adoration that her brothers receive as their birthright. She hates also the drudgery she has to endure as part of her training for womanhood. When she is fourteen, Celaya’s father sends her to do housekeeping at a rectory so that the family can afford Catholic school. Fortunately, her mother, Zoila, sympathizes with the young girl’s hatred of domestic work, and so she allows Celaya to get out of the job by pretending that her traditional Mexican parents don’t want her out late at night.38 From an early age, Celaya insists on going her own way. This insistence will cause her pain throughout her life. At the beginning of the novel, for example, a very young Celaya is off by herself “building sand houses,” while the rest of the family has their picture taken by a man hawking recuerdos (literally, a remembrance) on the shores of Acapulco (4). The souvenir photo of the family vacation will forever hang “above Father’s bed,” a symbol of Celaya’s intimate distance from those she loves (3). Near the end of the novel, Celaya’s intense desire to escape the confines of her father’s home compels her to run away to Mexico with Ernesto, a boy she almost loves and whom she almost marries. Not long after the two make love, Ernesto attends mass and is told by a priest that his dalliance with this young, unmarried woman is a betrayal of his faith. Ernesto gives Celaya a hard lesson in sexual politics, telling her that “what he [the priest] made me see is this. My mother is like la Virgen de Guadalupe, and I’m her only son, and now I’ve hurt her” (387). Celaya is wounded, though the pain she feels is nothing compared to the silent suffering she would likely have faced had they gone through with their furtive wedding. Caramelo is, among other things, an accounting of what it costs women to be independent. In fact, there are autobiographical dimensions to this novel that make it seem as if Cisneros, a proud feme sole, is adding up the price of having “a room of one’s own.” However, if Celaya is hurt by her refusal to follow the script written for her as a girl, she is also liberated by it. She was left out of the picture as a child in Acapulco,

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but that accidental omission made her into an artist: instead of being in the photo, it was “as if I’m the photographer walking along the beach with the tripod camera on my shoulder asking,—¿Un recuerdo?A souvenir? A memory?” (4). For the rest of her life, she will be part of the family on her own terms, not as a submissive caretaker, nor as a silent observer, but as a narrator. The stories she tells about her family and herself carry her into adulthood and give her freedom because she can tell them her way. They also have the unexpected effect of drawing her closer to her family. Celaya’s grandmother returns from the grave and begs the narrator to leave out the ugly parts of the family history, especially those that reflect poorly on the departed woman. Celaya refuses, but in doing so she allows her grandmother’s memory to find peace. Something similar happens with her father. Celaya worries that her failed elopement to Mexico with Ernesto will destroy her relationship with her father, whom she loves with sincere intensity. The moment when Inocencio Reyes finally arrives in Mexico City to pick her up at a relative’s house is a difficult one for both of them: Celaya worries that her protective father will turn her out of the family; her father breaks down in tears, convinced that he has failed his daughter. Yet as painful as it is, Celaya’s escape to Mexico represents a kind of Indepedence Day for her, because in taking ownership of her sexual life, she gains control of her body and her mind in other areas as well. The story line of Celaya’s flight to Mexico City is a pivotal one in terms of Cisneros’s engagement with Chicana feminism. As I argued above, the dominant Chicano nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s was erected on a sexual division of labor that defined men as public guardians of la raza, and women as its private caretaker. This division of labor—which exists in dominant U.S. nationalism and other nationalisms as well—requires the careful monitoring of female sexuality, since women are capable of undermining the imagined purity of the race if they reproduce with men outside the tribe, if they don’t reproduce at all, or if they refuse to pass on social norms to their children. Celaya’s assertion of her sexual independence is done in open defiance of this policing. She and Ernesto make love in a hotel room with a view of the Zócalo, Mexico City’s magnificent historic plaza. Though she later worries about her beloved father’s reaction, Celaya has no regret about her decision. To the contrary, her experiences with sex are good ones: “We’re thirsty, thirsty. We’re salt water and sweet. And the bitter and the sad mixes with the dulce [sweet]. It’s as if we’re rivers and oceans emptying and filling and swelling and drowning one another. It’s frightening and wonderful all at once. For once, I feel as

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if there’s not enough of me, as if I’m too small to contain the happiness inside me” (382–83). The fact that this liaison takes place at the Zócalo of all places might suggest to some readers that Celaya is making a return to an ancestral homeland. The narrative, though, works to undermine this interpretation. In Mexico, the Zócalo represents an official center of the nationstate. Each day an enormous Mexican flag is ceremoniously raised and lowered over the plaza to mark the continued life of the nation. Each September 15 at 11:00 p.m., with only a few exceptions, the Mexican president emerges from a balcony of the Palacio Naciónal and yells “el grito de Dolores,” the battle cry that began Mexico’s war of independence in 1810. The Zócalo may symbolize the birthplace of the Mexican nation, but it does not own Celaya. She and her lover stand on the balcony overlooking the Zócalo, watching the traffic below. Ernesto is awestruck at all the history that has happened at this plaza, the triumphs and defeats of great civilizations. Celaya, though, is “thinking about the women, the ones who had no choice but to jump from these bell towers not so long ago. . . . Women whose lives were so lousy, jumping from a tower sounded good. And here I am leaning on an iron balustrade at the holy center of the universe, a boy with his hands under my skirt, and me with no intention of leaping for nothing or nobody” (383). Celaya will not sacrifice her sexual freedom for someone else’s dream of a nation. Nor will she do it for the benefit of religious authorities. After Ernesto chooses his mother over her, Celaya visits the magnificent baroque cathedral that stands on one side of the plaza. Looking at the shuttered doors of “the old church,” she has an epiphany of her own: “I didn’t expect this. I mean the faith. I mixed up the Pope with this, with all this, this light, this energy, this love. The religion part can go out the window. But I didn’t realize about the strength and power of la fe [the faith]. What a goof I’ve been!” (388–89). Through Celaya’s narrative of discovery, Caramelo lays claim to feminism as an essential aspect of contemporary Chicano/a politics. The autonomy she wins for herself in Mexico City is the novel’s affirmation of the rights of women and men, gays and straights to express their sexuality in the ways they want, without having to follow a racial script. The respect that Cisneros has for sexual freedom is something that she inherits and expands out of the long tradition of Chicana feminism. In the 1960s and 1970s, this insistence on sexual freedom was interpreted by hard-line nationalists as a form of betrayal. Feminists were sometimes accused of being man-haters and lesbians, an ad hominem charge that ended discussion and that prompted queer women either to stay in

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the closet or to keep their distance from Chicano/a politics. Feminists were said to be slavish followers of white women, a charge that Marta Cotera and others disputed by giving a genealogy of Chicana feminism that went back to Yucatán feminists such as Hermila Galindo and to labor activists such as Emma Tenayuca and Manuela Sager, rather than to Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan.39 Armando Rendón, author of the nationalist treatise Chicano Manifesto, worried about the low college matriculation rate for Mexican American women not because it denied them an education, but because “they are excluded from the best setting for catching a promising young Chicano.”40 The narrative of Chicana feminism as a betrayal of the Chicano movement came together in the resuscitation of Malintzin Tenepal, the woman said to have aided Hernan Cortés in the conquest of indigenous Mexico by translating for him and by birthing a half-Indian, half-Spanish mestizo child. Accused by chauvinists of being malinches (traitors) to the Chicano nation, Chicana feminists rewrote the narrative of this woman, making it into a story of wit and survival in the face of great danger.41 In 1974, Adelaida R. Del Castillo published an influential “new perspective” on Malintzín in the feminist journal Encuentro Femenil, where she historicized the indigenous woman and wisely argued that Malintzín could never have betrayed Mexico because Mexico both as idea and as nationstate did not exist until much later. Del Castillo drew a parallel between Malintzín and Mexican American women: “Doña Marina is significant in that she embodies effective, decisive action in the feminine form, and most important, because her own actions syncretized two conflicting worlds causing the emergence of a new one—my own. Here, woman acts not as a goddess in some mythology, but as an actual force in the making of history.”42 This Chicana reinterpretation has aged well, influencing even the way that Doña Marina is perceived in Mexico. Though feminists were able to able to transform it and use it as motivation, the malinche label stung. Lorna Dee Cervantes, a movement poet whose work is widely anthologized and taught in the classroom, memorably captures the disappointment that feminists felt toward men who romanticized women as symbols of “why we fight,” only to then sideline them as babymakers and maids. The opening stanza of “Para un revolucionario” begins with an erotic rendering of conservative nationalism’s appeal: You speak of art And your soul is like snow,

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A soft powder raining from your Mouth, Covering my breasts and hair. You speak of your love of mountains, Freedom, and your love for a sun Whose warmth is like una liberación [a liberation] pouring down upon brown bodies. For women as for men, Aztlán represented a new order where the dark body is not constrained by poverty and inferiority. The speaker worries, though, that a Chicano nation will be built on the sexual burdens that existed in the nation it replaced. The speaker tells the revolutionary that she feels “lost . . . “[i]n the wail of tus hijos [your children]” and “[i]n the clatter of dishes.” She confesses: I am afraid that you will lie with me And awaken too late to find that you have fallen And my hands will be left groping For you and your dream In the midst of la revolución [the revolution].43 There is anger in these lines. There is also a note of sadness that springs from the commitment of Chicana feminists to the Chicano movement, for though some men accused them of being traitors, they were proud of their cultural roots, and they were working intensely for the good of their communities—children, women, and men. The archive makes this fact very clear. The Chicanas who publicly disidentified with feminism at the 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation Conference did so not because they thought women had enough equality; they did so because they wanted to defend the rights of all Mexican Americans, and they hoped men felt the same way. The manifesto they issued at the end of their breakout sessions walked a very fine line between embracing nationalism and acknowledging the second-class status of women. Though these “loyalists” were intending to distance themselves from feminism by resolving “not to separate but to strengthen and free our nation of Aztlán,” they nevertheless drew on feminist rhetoric in their call to “develop a full consciousness and awareness of the woman to the revolution and of the revolution to the women.” They insisted that “men and women, young and old, must assume the responsibility for the love, care, education, and

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orientation of all the children of Aztlán,” and they also declared that women must have “self-determination.”44 A few years later, some of these women changed their minds about feminism. They were angry at the housekeeping they were always asked to do, and disillusioned by the apathy and outright hostility of some men. But they never at any time abandoned their commitment to the cause. Chicana feminists were leaders in the United Farm Workers, the Crusade for Justice, the Brown Berets, Comisión Femenil, La Raza Unida, the Mexican American Youth Organization, El Centro de Acción Social y Autónomo (The Center for Autonomous Social Action), and many other organizations. Women like Dolores Huerta had very public positions of power. More often, though, women led by doing the many underappreciated but indispensible tasks that make a movement work. Celaya, too, is committed to her family and to her culture, though the traditionalists around her think otherwise. She is the one who preserves the cuentos (stories) of her loved ones and passes them on to us, her readers. When Celaya is young, she is intimidated by her father’s mother, an overpowering presence “who squawks from the courtyard up to the second-story bedrooms . . . from the rooftop all through the neighborhood of La Villa” (29). Awful Grandmother spends the first half of the novel pestering her sons, berating her daughters-in-law, and scolding her grandchildren for abandoning their culture and their mother tongue. But in spite of her fears, and in spite of her grandmother’s protestations, the perceptive Celaya senses that her life is somehow interwoven with that of her grandmother. At first she doesn’t have a language for this connection apart from her fascination with her grandmother’s beautiful rebozos, intricately woven shawls that seem to represent womanhood, family ties, Mexico, and herself all at the same time. Gradually, though, Celaya comes to understand more of her grandmother, Soleded Reyes. In the remarkable second of the book’s three parts, the ghost of the departed woman returns from the grave and enters into a conversation with Celaya, listening and commenting as the girl tells the story of the time before she was born, the time “when I was dirt” (89). The story that Celaya tells with the help of her grandmother is a distinctively Chicano/a story, which is to say that most Mexicans in America—whether they and their families came before or after the overhaul of U.S. immigration in 1965—are tied in some way to the narrative that these two weave together. Their story begins in San Luis Potosí at the end of the 1800s, a period when the dictator Porfirio Díaz is modernizing Mexico by creating a secure government infrastructure, privatizing

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national resources, and cementing the enormous chasm between a rich minority and an impoverished majority that still exists today. This moment in time gave rise to one of the largest movements of humans across borders in recorded history: as U.S. capital went south, millions of Mexicans came north, increasing the size of the Chicano/a population by an order of magnitude and prompting a revolution in Mexico. Celaya’s decision to begin her tale at the Mexican Revolution is in keeping with the origin stories that circulated widely among Chicano/a activists of the 1960s and 1970s. Just as many people today are returning to the 1960s and 1970s in order to understand the present—and I am including myself here—Mexican Americans in the mid-twentieth century were engaging with the events surrounding 1910 in order to create a genealogy of their own time. On a bus trip to Washington, D.C., for the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, Chicano/a activists wrote and sang “Yo soy Chicano,” a corrido (narrative song) that adapted the bravado of revolutionary rhetoric for the Chicano movement.45 Attributed to Crusade for Justice member Lydia Domínguez, the anthem was an adaptation of “La rielera,” a famous song about a tempestuous love affair between the “railway woman” of the title and Juan, a soldier whom she loved and followed into war. Revolutionaries frequently appeared in fiction, poetry, and drama. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s play Los revolucionarios (The revolutionists) contrasted the materialism and apathy of the young people of his day with the bravery of their Mexican grandfathers. For better and for worse, muralists and painters in the Chicano movement played a major role in transforming Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa into popular left icons in the United States and abroad. Zapata’s cry of Tierra y Libertad (Land and Liberty) was a particularly powerful rallying cry for Chicano/a communities that had been made to feel like aliens in places with names like Los Angeles, Sacramento, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida. Caramelo fits within this movement tradition, but Celaya’s story revolves not around the towering men of the Revolution—the politicians, the soldiers, and the celebrated artists—but around the women who lived at the margins of this cataclysm. With her grandmother’s help, Celaya tells of her great-grandmother Guillermina Reyes, who with her husband made “rebozos so light and thin they can be pulled through a wedding ring.” Celaya explains that “everyone in the world agreed that Ambrosio Reyes’ black shawls were the most exquisite anyone had ever seen. . . . But it was his wife Guillermina’s fingers that gave the shawls their high value because of the fringe knotted into elaborate designs”

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(92). We learn of Soledad Reyes, later the Awful Grandmother, who “was still too little to braid her own hair” when her mother died, and who a short time later was sent away from her father and her cruel stepmother to live with her neglectful Aunt Fina (94). (With her encyclopedic style, Cisneros makes extensive use of fairy tales from around the world in trying to make sense of the mysteries of a human life.) As a mistreated servant to the wealthy Reyes family of Mexico City, Soledad suffers the extreme poverty and cruel violence of war. So too does her future husband, Narciso Reyes: during el Décimo, the Ten Tragic Days of bloodshed that descended on Mexico City in 1911, Narciso’s lung collapses from the “puro susto” (pure fear) of being rescued at the last possible moment from the firing squad (133). Celaya’s most memorable cuento, though, may be the one of Exaltación Henestrosa, the Oaxacan who becomes the object of Narciso’s lust when he was posted to a small village as a bookkeeper with the National Roads Commission. “A woman of a woman” with a “voice ronca like the sea” and “wide-waisted as the Tula tree Cortés is said to have slept under,” Exaltación has a dalliance with the obsessed Narciso. She is satisfied enough with their arrangement until she meets Pánfila Palafox, a traveling circus woman whose singing “confirmed without a doubt the existence of God” (174, 179). Like several characters in Caramelo, Palafox is a historical figure, a woman named Adela Delgadina Pulido Tovar who scandalized Mexico with her same-sex affairs and who “sang on corners, under stars, beneath balconies and in bars, where the scandalized public, out of curiosity and longing, thronged to hear her” (181). Exaltación Henestrosa and Pánfila Palafox are minor characters, but they do two crucial things within Cisneros’s narrative. First, they articulate a form of female sexuality that is not merely a tool for nation building. Narciso Reyes arrives in Oaxaca to supervise the construction of roads in what many thought a backwards and ungovernable state. His job is part of an effort to bring what is perceived as primitive Oaxaca into modern Mexico, and thus to help Mexico compete in a rapidly expanding system of global capitalism. Henestrosa and Palafox are part of this system. Indeed, everyone is. But these two women exist at its outer margins, where they cling to endangered traditions and create new traditions that help them keep a measure of control over their own lives. Their love for each other is not easily conscripted in the service of the nation’s hierarchies. Henestrosa and Palafox also situate Celaya’s story within the feminist tradition that gave rise to the Chicano movement. Geographically

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and temporally, the distance between Oaxaca in the 1920s and Denver or Fresno in the 1970s is great. Cisneros does not make explicit mention of Governor Alvarado, Hermila Galindo, or Ricardo Flores Magón. But Cisneros is a savvy historian, and Caramelo is a historically sophisticated novel. Notes at the end of many chapters give the reader factual background and translations of Spanish phrases. A chronology at the back of the book surveys Mexican and Chicano/a history from the meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma in 1521 to the death of actress María Félix in 2002. Does the subplot of Exaltación Henestrosa and Pánfila Palafox reference the feminist traditions of southern Mexico? Yucatán, the location of the feminist congresses of 1916, and Oaxaca are both part of the southern borderlands region. Henestrosa wears a “crown of iguanas” on her head, an allusion to the proud indigenous woman in feminist photographer Graciela Iturbide’s famous “Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas” (Our Lady of the Iguanas).46 By placing Exaltación and Pánfila in Celaya’s family tree, Caramelo incorporates Celaya into the feminist genealogy that helped give rise to the Chicano movement. Doing so is Cisneros’s way of rewriting Chicana feminism. She narrates it not as a response to the failures of men in the 1960s and 1970s, but rather as a time-honored, transnational tradition of social justice. All of us grapple at moments in our lives with the need to better understand our history, but this need is especially urgent for Celaya because neither Mexico nor the United States has a narrative that makes sense of the worlds she occupies. Fashioning the jumbled details of her life into a story allows Celaya to make sense of a private self that often does not fit the expectations of those around her. By then relating that story to a reader, she affirms her public self, and particularly her racial identity. Celaya is fascinated throughout her life with skin color. When she is very young, her fascination mirrors every child’s curiosity about physical diversity. On the first page of the book, she describes her father’s skin as “pulpy and soft, pale as the belly side of a shark.” Awful Grandmother “has the same light skin as Father, but in elephant folds, stuffed into a bathing suit the color of an old umbrella” (3–4). Because Celaya has yet to learn the meanings attached to skin, she is able to take pleasure in surfaces, making poetry out of what she sees. This ability gets lost with age, though. Celaya still notices physical differences as she gets older, but these differences become confusing— even menacing—because she learns that they have different social value. Her first and most profound lesson comes when she is in Mexico and meets Candelaria, the daughter of Awful Grandmother’s washerwoman.

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Celaya is overwhelmed by her beauty: “The girl Candelaria has skin bright as a copper veinte centavos [twenty cents] coin after you’ve sucked it. Not transparent as an ear like Aunty Light-Skin’s. Not shark-belly pale like Father and the Grandmother. Not the red river-clay of Mother and her family. Not the coffee-with-too-much-milk color like me, nor the fried-tortilla color of the washerwoman Amparo, her mother. Not like anybody. Smooth as peanut butter, deep as burnt-milk candy” (34). Candelaria’s caramel skin gives the novel its name, but Celaya quickly discovers that those around her disdain the dark girl. Her cousin Antonieta Araceli wonders why she lets “that Indian” play with her. When rumor spreads that Candelaria cannot afford underwear, the kids invent a game of tag that allows them to peek under her skirt. The impoverished girl wears “a course pleat of cloth between her legs, homemade shorts wrinkled and dim as dish towels” (36). Repulsed and ashamed of herself, Celaya flees when her friend gets up and runs toward her. The education that Mexico gives Celaya is continued in the United States. When the Revolution forced Celaya’s grandfather into the United States, the young man naively fell in love with a black woman named Jo Wells who performed at a club in Chicago. The future Josephine Baker was also a refugee, having fled the white mobs of St. Louis in 1917. Narciso Reyes writes home to inform his parents of his inamorata, but the news is greeted with shock and horror: “What! Una negra to be his daughter-inlaw! Una negra to become a Reyes! But this was too much” (141). This story, a commentary on the sad reality of antiblack prejudice among Latinos/as, is strictly speaking not Celaya’s, since it takes place some forty years before she is born. The story becomes hers through retelling, though. Later she will have her own encounter with colorism. Not long after the teenaged Celaya moves to San Antonio from Chicago, Cookie Cantú and her clique of provincial Chicanas accosts Celaya with taunts of: “What you looking at, bolilla [white girl]? Think you’re so smart because you talk like a white girl.” They yell: “Brown power! Making fists and chanting,—Viva La Raza” (354, 356). These girls parrot the rhetoric of Chicano/a nationalism, but they have yet to learn that the soul of the Chicano movement was a desire to end white supremacy and a commitment to justice and opportunity. During the 1960s and 1970s, activists did write “Brown Power!” on their homemade placards and in their manifestos. The phrase—borrowed from black nationalist rhetoric—was not an assertion of Chicano/a superiority, though anxious critics often interpreted it as such. It was instead a metaphor for all the different ways there are to be human, an implicit challenge to the entrenched idea that white is better.

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Celaya learns this lesson from Candelaria, the girl whose caramelo skin was “so sweet, it hurts to even look at her.” When Celaya first saw Candelaria, she tripped on Awful Grandmother’s heel. The moment transformed her: “Until I meet Candelaria I think beautiful is Aunty Light-Skin, or the dolls with the lavender hair I get at Christmas, or the women on the beauty contests we watch on television.” Celaya begins to dream of a future with her playmate, choosing Candelaria as her “husband” in traditional children’s games: “When we play mata rile rile ron I want to hold hands with you, Candelaria, if your mother will let you, just for a little, before you go back to the job of the laundry, please” (34–35). Freud argues that in normal human development, the anarchies of sexual desire give way to reproductive sex between a man and a woman. Schoolyard cruelty pushes Celaya away from Candelaria, but the experience remains with her. Loving Candelaria gives Celaya a way to value herself as a girl and later as a young woman. Her desire also allows her to value her skin color and the stories it tells. The national narrative of the United States is written in black and white, with white as the protagonist; Mexico’s mestizo nationalism idealizes brown skin, but whiteness has unearned privileges south of the border, just as it does to the north. Through Candelaria, Celaya comes to realize that she is part of a Mexican nation that transcends traditional racial and geopolitical borders. Cisneros’s description of this “greater Mexico” is worth quoting at length: There are the green-eyed Mexicans. The rich blond Mexicans. The Mexicans with the faces of Arab sheiks. The Jewish Mexicans. The big-footed-as-a-German Mexicans. The Tarahumara tall-as-desertsaguaro Mexicans. The Mediterranean Mexicans. The Mexicans with Tunisian eyebrows. The negrito Mexicans of the double coasts. The Chinese Mexicans. The curly-haired, freckled-faced, redheaded Mexicans. The jaguar-lipped Mexicans. The wide-as-a-Tulatree Zapotec Mexicans. The Lebanese Mexicans. Look, I don’t even know what you’re talking about when you say I don’t look Mexican. I am Mexican. Even though I was born on the U.S. side of the border. (353)47 Celaya’s imagined nation recognizes communities and histories often excluded from conservative nationalism, and it originates with a commitment to sexual equality. School and media each in their way condition us to think that race no longer matters in our postsegregation age. The election of President

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Barack Obama represents an unquestionable victory for antiracism, but the opponents of civil rights are using it to downplay growing racial inequality. As a result, more than a few whites are falling for the old saw that says they are victims of reverse racism. Whatever the dominant narratives suggest about race, the reality is that brown skin is increasingly stigmatized, often in contradictory ways. The political class veers between an uninformed infatuation with Hispanics around election time and an equally uninformed nativism between votes. The collapse of the financial markets in 2009 gave rise to the same Mexican scapegoating that has followed every panic since the 1870s. Yet good times seem never to stamp out national anxieties about the presence of brown bodies on U.S. soil. Even amid the boom years of the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans alike spoke of a “border crisis” and of overly generous immigration policies. Politicians insist they are only concerned with illegality, but their studied refusal to prosecute white-collar criminals suggests that something more than the law is at stake. A similar dynamic plays itself out in popular culture. American media has a long history of incorporating and even idealizing Latinness. Selena Gomez, Shakira, DaddyYankee, Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayak, and Christina Aguilera are merely newer iterations of a tradition that goes back to Dolores Del Rio, María Félix, and Desi Arnez.48 In Caramelo, Cisneros frequently cites Latino/a icons, both as a form of tribute, and to emphasize the enormous contrast between the media’s idealization of latinidad and the everyday experience of Latinos/as. Because Hollywood is obsessed with its version of the Renaissance ideal of white beauty, Latin stars are typically light-skinned and upwardly mobile. Latinos/as come in all different colors, though, and their experiences in the United States are much more uneven than popular culture suggests: an enormous underclass and working class of mostly black- and brownskinned individuals who face a deindustrializing economy with little job security and shrinking government protections; a smaller middle class with substantially lower incomes than their white, non-Hispanic peers; and a tiny, mostly white Hispanic upper class that often hails from Latin America’s elites. Mass media rarely ventures to represent this complexity, preferring instead the safety of its stereotypes. Fear and uncertainty about brownness in America is nothing new. In the nineteenth century, brown skin—especially Mexican brown skin—was a sign of miscegenation and a bar to the divine mission of Anglo-Saxon settlement.49 Persistent antiracist activism has carried us a long way from this terrible legacy, but September 11 has sadly given

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new dimensions to antibrown feeling by pulling Arabs and Arab Americans into its orbit. This commingling of Mexicans and Arabs may seem strange: the former are primarily Catholic and locate their origins in Europe and indigenous America; the latter are mainly Muslim and trace their roots to the Arab peninsula. Public discourse smooths over these differences and patterns Mexicans and Arabs into a common threat to national security. Actively disregarding their varied history, the political and popular culture of the United States renders these diverse demographics as tradition-bound, irrational, and destructive. Brownness cements this association in the imagination of post-9/11 America. Mexicans and Arabs represent a contagion that is invading the borders of the nation and contaminating the body politic.50 Caramelo turns this association on its head. Despite their obvious differences, Chicanos/as and Arab Americans do indeed have a great deal in common with each other. Both groups track part of their history to the diaspora created when Christian and Muslim elites fought for control of the Iberian Peninsula and the trade routes of Europe. Both groups also define themselves through the sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful experience of being between two cultures, and transcending both. Cisneros responds to the stigmatization of brown bodies by making the layered connections between Arab cultures and Mexican cultures a source of hope rather than fear. In Caramelo, brown symbolizes the bonds that connect different people across time and place. Celaya’s great-grandmother Guillermina makes rebozos using an art that is “so old no one remembers whether it arrived from the east, from the macramé of Arabia through Spain, or from the west from the blue-sky bay of Acapulco where galleons bobbed weighted down with the fine porcelain, lacquerware, and expensive silk of Manila and China” (92). When she died, Guillermina left her daughter “an unfinished rebozo, the design so complex that no other woman was able to finish it without undoing the threads and starting over.” Celaya eventually inherited this shawl, with its “beautiful blend of toffee, licorice, and vanilla stripes flecked with black and white” (94). To Celaya, this caramelo design represents her working-class, multilingual, and transborder Reyes family. It also represents the unseen and too often unacknowledged threads of history and humanity that tie all peoples together. As the narrator says in a footnote: “The rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere.” For Cisneros, the caramelo shade of brown that gives the novel its title is a border-crossing symbol of desire and possibility.

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Celaya’s story represents the ongoing vitality of Chicano/ activism today, both in literature and in life. Cisneros does not draw naively on the nationalist politics of the 1960s and 1970s. She confronts conservative nationalism for abusing the rhetoric of familia to marginalize women. She also cautions against ethnic chauvinism. Yet Cisneros draws a distinction between these failures and all that the movement has accomplished. Building on a tradition of progressive populism that reaches back into the nineteenth century, Chicano/a activists of the 1960s and 1970s successfully mobilized their communities around issues of endless war, poor education, job and housing discrimination, and language rights. Pushback by conservatives and neoliberalism’s ascendancy has transformed the political landscape since the 1970s, but artists and activists have adapted by focusing on more local issues and by keeping an eye on the long view. What remains consistent in Chicano/a politics is its call for a different model of citizenship, one that crosses borders within the hemisphere and around the globe, one that is multilingual, and one that is committed to equality for everyone.

Notes

Introduction 1. Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981), 205; Joseph M. Palacios (foundation director and founding board member, Catholics for Equality), in discussion with the author, January 2011. 2. In contemporary usage, the word “art” usually refers to the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. This book explores the visual arts, but it also examines theater, literature, music, and other expressive forms. The definition of art given in the Oxford English Dictionary is instructive: “Any of the various pursuits or occupations in which creative or imaginative skill is applied according to aesthetic principles . . . the various branches of creative activity, as painting, sculpture, music, literature, dance, drama, oratory, etc.” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “art,” www.oed.com/view/Entry/11125). 3. Robert Reinhold, “1980 Census Shows 17% Growth of Blacks Surpassed Rise for U.S.,” New York Times, February 24, 1981, LexisNexis Academic. 4. Pamela G. Hollie, “Courting the Hispanic Market,” New York Times, December 26, 1983, LexisNexis Academic. 5. Dan Balz, “As the Hispanic Vote Emerges, Republicans Seek to Christen It,” Washington Post, July 11, 1981, LexisNexis Academic; David Hoffman, “Hispanics, Seen as Pivotal 1984 Voters, Courted by Both Parties,” Washington Post, August 12, 1983. 6. Clara E. Rodríguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 7, 12. 7. “The New Face of America,” special issue, Time 142, no. 21 (1993). 8. Rodríguez, Changing Race, 103. 9. Ibid., 12. 10. Betsy Guzmán, Census 2000 Brief: The Hispanic Population (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, May 2001), 2, 7.

198 / notes 11. Haya El Nasser, “Census Shows Greater Number of Hispanics,” USA Today, March 8, 2001, LexisNexis Academic. 12. Brad Knickerbocker, “Census Data Show Hispanic Boom,” Christian Science Monitor, March 24, 2011, LexisNexis Academic. 13. Lynette Clemetson, “Hispanics Now Largest Minority, Census Says,” New York Times, January 22, 2003, LexisNexis Academic; A Multicultural Milestone,” St. Petersburg Times, January 28, 2003, LexisNexis Academic; Gary Younge, “Latinos Become Main Minority Group in U.S.: Shift Is a Turning Point in the Nation’s History,” Guardian of London, January 23, 2003, Lexis Nexis Academic. 14. Teresa Cordova et al., “Building Networks to Tackle Global Restructuring: The Environmental and Economic Justice Movement,” in The Collaborative City: Opportunities and Struggles for Blacks and Latinos in U.S. Cities, ed. John Jairo Betancur and Doug Gills (New York: Garland, 2000), 188–89; Mark Sawyer, “Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latina/o Identities and Coalitions,” in Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos, ed. Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 275. 15. Toni Morrison, “On the Back of Blacks,” Time 142, no. 21 (Fall 1993): 57. See also Roberto Suro, Strangers among Us: How Latino Immigration Is Transforming America (New York: Knopf, 1998), 242–64; Arlene Davila, Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 16. Davila, Latino Spin. 17. Latino in America, CNN, October 21–22, 2009. 18. Lyn Di Iorio Sandín, Killing Spanish: Literary Essays on Ambivalent U.S. Latino/a Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Debra A. Castillo, Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 19. Conóceme en Iowa: The Official Report of the Governor’s Spanish Speaking Task Force (Des Moines, Iowa: Task Force, 1979); Iowa Office of Latino Affairs, www.latinoaffairs.iowa.gov/. 20. For a listing of these programs, see the appendix to Rodolfo F. Acuña, The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 21. Héctor Tobar, Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States (New York: Penguin, 2005), 106–10. 22. Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 1–3. 23. Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978–1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). 24. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 29. 25. Ibid., 46, 206. 26. Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohen, and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less (Washington, D.C.: Pew Hispanic Center, 2012). 27. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 71–72.

notes / 199 28. On the complex politics of whiteness in and around Latino/a history, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Rodríguez, Changing Race; Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Davila, Latino Spin. 29. Harvey M. Choldin, “Statistics and Politics: The ‘Hispanic Issue’ in the 1980 Census,” Demography 23, no. 3 (1986): 403–18; Rodríguez, Changing Race, 102. 30. Rachel L. Swarns, “Immigrant Groups Plan Campaigns to Bring Legal Changes,” New York Times, April 20, 2006, LexisNexis Academic. 31. “About CHCI,” Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, www.chci.org/about/. 32. “About SVREP,” Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, www.svrep. org/about_svrep.php. 33. Text from the Plan of Delano, Basta! La historia de nuestra lucha / Enough! The Tale of Our Struggle, with photographs by George Elfie Ballis (Delano, Calif.: Farm Worker Press, 1966), 7. 34. Ibid., 10–17. 35. Michael C. Dawson, Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 27, 60. 36. Plan of Delano, Basta! La historia de nuestra lucha / Enough! The Tale of Our Struggle, 63–66. 37. While working at Simon and Schuster, Martínez edited Lorraine Hansberry’s stunning 1964 photo essay of the civil rights struggle. The 1963 Birmingham church bombing led her to join the movement full-time as part of SNCC’s Freedom Summer. Afterward she edited an anthology of letters home from participants in the Freedom Summer (see Lorraine Hansberry, The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964]; Elizabeth Sutherland, Letters from Mississippi [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965]; Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, interview by Loretta Ross, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, March 3 and August 6, 2006, www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/vof-narrators.html). 38. Gary B. Nash, American Odyssey: The United States in the Twentieth Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999); Paul S. Boyer, American Nation (Austin, Texas: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 2005); Joyce Oldham Appleby, ed., The American Journey (Columbus, Ohio: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2009). 39. David Reyes and Tom Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock n Roll from Southern California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 11–12. For more on the music of the Chicano movement and on Latino/o music history, see Steven Loza, Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); John Storm Roberts, The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Anthony Macías, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and Deborah R. Vargas, Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 40. Macías, Mexican American Mojo, 180–81. 41. Reyes and Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances, xviii, 11–17, 47.

200 / notes 42. Ibid., 55. 43. Ibid., 62. 44. Ibid. 45. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, updated ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1998), 108. 46. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Toronto: Bantam, 1987), 3. 47. Bernard von Bothmer, Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 2. 48. Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). 49. Bothmer, Framing the Sixties, 2. 50. Ibid. 51. Phyllis Schlafly Report 5, no. 7 (February 1972): 3, 4, quoted in Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 104. 52. Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass (New York: Morrow, 1993), 20. 53. Richard Kogan, “Federal Spending, 2001–2008: Defense Is a Rapidly Growing Share of the Budget, While Domestic Appropriations Have Sunk” (Washington, D.C.: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2008), www.cbpp.com. 54. Linda Chavez, Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (New York: Basic, 1991), 61. 55. Constance McGovern, “From Left to Right?,” America 187, no. 15 (2002): 33. 56. Linda Chavez, An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal, or, How I Became the Most Hated Hispanic in America (New York: Basic, 2002), 134. 57. Ibid., 60, 91. 58. Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), xviii. 59. Tom Brokaw, Boom: Voices of the Sixties (New York: Random House, 2007), 11. 60. William L O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960’s (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 79. 61. Ibid., 64, 93. 62. Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube : Sixties Television & the Youth Rebellion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 63. Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 64. O’Neill, Coming Apart; Gitlin, The Sixties; Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988); Douglas M. Knight, Street of Dreams: The Nature and Legacy of the 1960s (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989); David Burner, Making Peace with the 60s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Jules Witcover, The Year the Dream Died: Revising 1968 in America (New York: Warner, 1997); Jon Margolis, The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 (New York: Morrow, 1999); Martha Tod Dudman, Expecting to Fly: A Sixties Reckoning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004); Brokaw, Boom: Voices of the Sixties. 65. Mario Barrera and Marilyn Mulford, Chicano Park, directed by Marilyn Mulford (Berkeley: Red Bird Films, 1988). 66. José Angel Gutiérrez, The Making of a Chicano Militant: Lessons from Cristal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 11.

notes / 201 67. Ibid., 295, 297. 68. Cherríe Moraga, “Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe,” in The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 148. 69. John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 70. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 71. Timothy Miller, “The Sixties-Era Communes,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 327–52; Robert S. Fogarty, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2003). 72. Dominick Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 73. Lorena Oropeza, Raza sí!, guerra no!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Everett Alvarez Jr. and Anthony Pitch, Chained Eagle: The Heroic Story of the First American Shot Down over North Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2005), 208. 74. Chicano/a activists avidly read C. Wright Mills in the classroom and in informal readings groups. They also read work by feminists Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Robin Morgan; by Brazilian radical Paulo Freire and Algerian anticolonialist Frantz Fanon; by Mexican and Mexican American intellectuals Jose Vasconcelos, Miguel León-Portillo, Manuel Gamio, and George I. Sánchez; by environmentalist Rachel Carson; by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; by the union organizer Saul Alinsky; and by Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse-tung. The diversity and vigor of Chicano/a intellectual life during the 1960s and 1970s is one of the movement’s most underappreciated aspects, and also one of its most important legacies (see Armando Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995], 85; and David Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981 [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010], 59). 75. Though Acosta’s experiences in the Chicano movement were hardly representative, the fictionalized accounts of his life in The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People have helped preserve public memory of the movement. The singular lyricism of these books makes them useful touchstones for thinking about the many dimensions of the Chicano movement (see Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Revolt of the Cockroach People [New York: Vintage, 1989], 211; and Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo [New York: Vintage, 1989]). 76. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner, eds., “El plan espiritual de Aztlan,” in Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature (New York: Knopf, 1972), 402. 77. NBC News, NBC, September 4, 1972. 78. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (New York: Modern Library, 2004); Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican

202 / notes Repatriation in the 1930s, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 43, 121–22. For an overview of Mexican American history before the Chicano movement, see Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Ribera, Mexican Americans, American Mexicans: From Conquistadors to Chicanos, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Manuel Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2011). 79. Ernesto B. Vigil, The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 189. 80. Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization, 385. 81. José Angel Gutiérrez, A Chicano Manual on How to Handle Gringos (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2003), xiv–xv. 82. Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization, 409. 83. Sara M. Evans, “Beyond Declension: Feminist Radicalism in the 1970s and 1980s,” in The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, ed. Van Gosse and Richard R. Moser (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 52–66. 84. Gitlin, The Sixties, 433. 85. Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan, 2006). 86. Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 87. Suro, Strangers among Us, 47. 88. Arlene Dávila astutely shows how Latino/a marketers and businesspeople sometimes enhance their position in the free market by identifying themselves as part of the Hispanic “boom,” while simultaneously distancing themselves from the poor and racialized migrants who are largely behind the growth of the Latino/a population. Intriguing as it is on many levels, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s popular Latina romance The Dirty Girls Social Club is a frustrating case in point because its rather banal message that “not all Latinos are the same” is only effective to the extent that it disidentifies with undocumented migrants. One major reason we need to do a better job of situating the Chicano movement in U.S. and global history is to encourage the opposite. 89. Van Gosse, “Postmodern America: A New Democratic Order in the Second Gilded Age,” in The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, ed. Richard R. Moser and Gosse (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 7. 90. Lauren Berlant, “’68, or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (October 1, 1994): 124–55; The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Edward P. Morgan, What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010); Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 91. Dionne Espinoza, “‘Revolutionary Sisters’: Women’s Solidarity and Collective Identification among Chicana Brown Berets in East Los Angeles, 1967–1970,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 26, no. 1 (November 1, 2001): 15–58; Ernesto Chávez, “Mi Raza Primero!” (My People First!): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); George Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano

notes / 203 Movement, 1965–1975 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 92. Mario Barrera, Carlos Muñoz, and Charles Ornelas, “The Barrio as Internal Colony,” Urban Affairs Annual Reviews 6 (1972): 484. Ramón A. Gutiérrez gives a remarkable history of where this idea came from and how it circulated in “Internal Colonialism: An American Theory of Race,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 1, no. 2 (2004): 281–95. 93. Chon Noriega, “Conceptual Graffiti and the Public Art Museum: Spray Paint LACMA,” in Asco: Elite of the Obscure, a Retrospective, 1972–1987, ed. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita C. Gonzalez (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 256. 94. Ignacio M. García, “Juncture in the Road: Chicano Studies since ‘El Plan De Santa Bárbara,’” in Chicanas/Chicanos at the Crossroads: Social, Economic, and Political Change (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 93. 95. Ibid., 189, 199. 96. Ibid., 190. 97. Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement, 213. 98. Lorena Oropeza, “Making History: The Chicano Movement,” in Voices of a New Chicana/o History, ed. Refugio I. Rochín and Dennis N. Valdés (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 197–230. 99. Edward J. McCaughan, Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 80. 100. García, “Juncture in the Road,” 191. 101. According to historian Terry H. Anderson, “it appears that between 1965 and 1968 only 2 or 3 percent of students considered themselves activists while only 20 percent had participated in at least one demonstration. . . . The movement was always a minority.” The latter number probably increased toward the end of the decade as a result of sentiment turning against Vietnam, but his point holds (see Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], preface). 102. García, “Juncture in the Road,” 181, 199. 103. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Trechler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 285–86. 104. McCaughan, Art and Social Movements, 166. 105. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3. 106. Ibid. 107. Pew Hispanic Center, Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States, 2009 (Washington, D.C., 2011), table 37, http://pewhispanic.org. 108. Laird W. Bergad and Herbert S. Klein, Hispanics in the United States: A Demographic, Social, and Economic History, 1980–2005 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 126, 166. In their eagerness to make the point that not all Latinos/ as are poor, Bergad and Klein understate the significance of the continued correlation between race and poverty in the United States, particularly in female-headed

204 / notes households. They do, however, draw attention to growing income inequality within all racial groups, a trend that is surely one of the central political problems of our time.

1 / Antennas and Mimeograph Machines 1. The Los Angeles Times had a front-page story about the Catalina invasion on August 31, 1972, and ran several follow-up pieces in the days that followed. See also Marguerite V. Marin, Social Protest in an Urban Barrio: A Study of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1974 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991), 165–69; and Armando Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 65–66. 2. Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 3. CBS Evening News, CBS, August 31, 1972. 4. Ibid. 5. The television archive is very difficult to work with, which is one reason why footage of Chicano movement activism has never been studied. Most programming from the 1940s and early 1950s is lost because networks reused film in order to keep costs down. Preservation efforts improved in the late 1950s after video-recording technology became available, but even then archiving was spotty, as the networks apparently still did not appreciate the long-term cultural and historical value of their product. On August 5, 1968, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive began recording the evening news broadcasts of all the major networks, and so from this day forward we have available a much more comprehensive record of American news programming. Unless otherwise noted, television broadcasts cited in this essay were accessed through the Vanderbilt archive, which is searchable online at http://tvnews. vanderbilt.edu/. 6. Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 102. 7. Since the 1820s, the black press alone covered stories of African American resistance to racial violence and discrimination. For more on this courageous tradition, see Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2001), 12–23; and Todd Vogel, ed., The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 8. Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 93. 9. Ibid., 181. 10. Torres, Black, White, and in Color, 15. 11. Carlos Muñoz Jr. in Youth, Identity, Power (66) explains the significant role that the black civil rights movement played in the political education of young Mexican American activists: “But from those numbers [of Chicano and Chicana students attending college in the early 1960s] came a few student activists who, between 1963 and 1967, were inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and participated in some activities and organizations of the civil rights movement.” 12. Rosales, Chicano!, xiii. 13. “Cast the First Stone,” Bell and Howell Close Up!, ABC, September 27, 1960, cited in Daniel Einstein, Special Edition: A Guide to Network Television Documentary Series and Special News Reports, 1955–1979 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 95.

notes / 205 14. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer at American Quarterly for suggesting this phrase. 15. For a discussion of how the federal government used television and especially the documentary format to shape how the U.S. public perceived “the middle ground” countries caught between the United States and the Soviet Union, see chapter 4 of Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 16. Gaye Tuchmann, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 23. 17. Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 13–48. 18. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992). 19. For a marvelous discussion of the rich union history of Mexican Americans during the 1930s and 1940s, see Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 20. “Farmworkers Complete Their 300-Mile March from Delano to Sacramento, California,” reported by Tom Pettit, NBC, accessed through http://nbcnewsarchives. com (media ID#1070BU96). The exact airdate of this particular broadcast is unavailable, but it appears from the online record that it was broadcast on The Huntley-Brinkley Report on Monday, April 11, 1966, one day after the conclusion of the march. CBS may have covered the March to Sacramento—in fact it seems likely given accounts of broad press coverage—but if it did, that footage has been lost. 21. Jacques E. Levy, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (New York: Norton, 1975), 140; Susan Ferris, Ricardo Sandoval, and Diana Hembree, The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 59. 22. Archive film footage, reported by David Horowitz and Lou Allison, NBC, March 10, 1968, accessed through http://nbcnewsarchives.com (media ID#0186BURB). 23. Torres, Black, White, and in Color, 10. Torres uses the phrase “the burden of liveness” (which she borrows from Jose Muñoz) to explain the imperative placed on blacks by television that they provide good film through performances of what it means to live and suffer as a minority. She writes, “In the context of the civil rights movement, bearing ‘the burden of liveness’ required movement workers to produce arresting television images juxtaposing peaceful protest with physical suffering at the hands of violent segregationists.” This is precisely what César Chávez did during his 1968 fast and indeed throughout his career. 24. According to Laura Pulido, the United Farm Workers began using public concern about the safety of pesticides as a means of garnering support for the union in 1968 (see Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996], 85). 25. Herman Gray uses the phrase “civil rights subjects” to describe “those black, largely middle-class benefactors who gained the most visibility as well as material and status rewards from the struggles and opportunities generated by the civil rights movement (see Herman Gray, “Remembering Civil Rights: Television, Memory, and the 1960s,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict,

206 / notes ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 353. The comparisons weren’t exact, but the network cameras used the template of Martin Luther King to make César Chávez into a Chicano civil rights subject. 26. Susan Ferriss, Ricardo Sandoval, and Diana Hembree, The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 225–27; Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). 27. ABC News, ABC, June 3, 1969. 28. This failure was not limited to coverage of the Chicano movement. The network news is often criticized for its inability to give meaningful context to current events, which may be one reason why public debate in the United States so frequently suffers from historical amnesia. This failure proves particularly problematic with a topic like the Chicano movement, as research suggests that TV has the greatest influence on audience perception when viewers have little other exposure to the issue at hand. Since few viewers in the 1960s and 1970s knew about Mexican American history, the mediocre coverage by the media was especially influential (see Edwin Diamond, The Tin Kazoo: Politics, Television, and the News [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975]; and Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland, 195). 29. The evidence is inconclusive, but Ian Haney-López makes the startling claim that novelist Oscar Zeta Acosta may have been behind these attacks (see Ian Haney López, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003], 234). 30. Ignacio M García, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 107; Ian Haney-López, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 192. 31. Torres, Black, White, and in Color, 89. The reference to Herman Gray above is Herman Gray, “Remembering Civil Rights: Television, Memory, and the 1960s,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 250. 32. CBS News, CBS, August 30, 1970 33. Ibid. 34. ABC News, ABC, April 28, 1970. 35. NBC Nightly News, NBC, June 15, 1971. 36. ABC Evening News, ABC, August 1, 1972. 37. Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí!¡ Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 38. NBC News, NBC, August 30, 1970. 39. Ibid. 40. NBC News, NBC, August 30, 1970. 41. Aaron Doyle, Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in Front of the Television Camera (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 38. Doyle is interested in this book in how televisual representations of often-racialized underclasses on shows like Cops have shaped the criminal justice system in Canada and the United States. Looking at television news footage of Chicano and black activism in the late 1960s suggests that the pathologized representations of minorities and poor whites on shows like this one might have their origins at least in part in evening news images of black and Chicano

notes / 207 militancy at the end of the 1960s. Perhaps the criminalization of cultural nationalist politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s is a kind of transitional period between idealized figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and debased figures like Willie Horton. 42. Ibid., 39–40. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Torres, Black, White, and in Color, 15. 47. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, Console-ing Passions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 48. Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, 260–65. 49. Ibid., 346. 50. For an in-depth account of how Richard Nixon built the modern GOP on this paranoia, see Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008). 51. “¡Mi Raza Primero!” (My People First): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 94–96. 52. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin, 1972), 132, 134. 53. See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Basic, 2008); and Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). While the massive social and political changes described in these books had an impact on everybody in the United States, Mexican Americans did not participate in the postwar domestic revival in the same way as whites because of pervasive class differences. This relationship of Chicanos and Chicanas to postwar suburbanization and new ideas of domesticity and consumption is a topic that deserves further study. 54. This famous phrase was coined in 1961 by FCC chairman Newton Minow in a portentous address he gave to the National Association of Broadcasters. 55. Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television & the Youth Rebellion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 31–38. 56. Vicki L. Ruiz, “‘Star Struck’: Acculturation, Adolescence, and Mexican American Women, 1920–1950,” in Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 374. 57. A. Arzate, “THE CISCO KID RIDES AGAIN (i.e. the movement doesn’t like my heroes),” Con Safos 1, no. 4 (1969): 28. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 29. 60. Robert Walter Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 16. For a new and insightful discussion of how the fiction and poetry surrounding the U.S.-Mexican War has historically destabilized the meanings of the two nations involved in that conflict, see Jaime Javier Rodríguez, The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 61. Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 106–7.

208 / notes 62. Robert J. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1998), 146. 63. Rosales, Chicano!, 210. 64. Maylei Blackwell, “Contested Histories: Las Hijas De Cuauhtemóc, Chicana Feminisms, and Print Culture in the Chicano Movement, 1968–1973,” in Chicana Feminisms: a Critical Reader, ed. Gabriela F Arredondo et al., Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 147–51. 65. Nicolás Kanellos, A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). 66. Juan J. Alonzo, Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009). 67. Kanellos, A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States, 70. 68. Chon A. Noriega, introduction to Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xv. 69. Morduant Hall, “Don Juan of the Plains,” New York Times, April 4, 1930. 70. “Crowd Raids Theatre Protesting Movie,” New York Times, June 25, 1930. 71. “Policeman, Beaten by Red Paraders, Kills the Leader,” New York Times, July 1, 1930. 72. Ibid. 73. Unsigned, “2,000 Reds March in Harlem Funeral,” New York Times, July 2, 1930; “2,500 Boo Police at Bier of Slain Red,” New York Times, July 5, 1930. 74. “Plan Protest Meeting at Bier of Slain Red,” New York Times, July 3, 1930. 75. Mario T. García, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 117. For commentary on the significance of Moreno’s activism, see Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 37–40, 112–21. 76. Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, 398, 474. 77. For a fuller discussion of movement-era television, see the work of Chon Noriega, especially “Between a Weapon and a Formula: Chicano Cinema and Its Contexts,” in Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 141–67; Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). On Cintrón, see Lillian Jiménez, “Puerto Rican Cinema in New York: From the Margin to the Center,” Jump Cut, no. 38 (June 1993): 60–66. The quotation above is from Noriega, Shot in America, 18. 78. The Future of Latino Independent Media: A NALIP Sourcebook (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2000). 79. Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube, 51. 80. Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Chicana Film Practices: Confronting the ‘Many-Headed Demon of Oppression,’” in Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 168–82. For a theoretical discussion of the relationship between feminist politics and video forms, see Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 81. Jesús Salvador Treviño, Eyewitness: A Filmmaker’s Memoir of the Chicano Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001), 81.

notes / 209 82. For brief mention of the “Walk Proud” boycott, see Noriega, “Chicanos and Film,” 145. For discussion of these other tactics deployed by media activists, see Francisco J. Lewels, The Uses of the Media by the Chicano Movement: A Study in Minority Access (New York: Praeger, 1974), 59, 66, 108. 83. CBS Evening News, CBS, July 30, 1970. 84. See, for example, Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Ken Wachsberger, ed., Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press (Tempe, Ariz.: Mica Press, 1993); Jean-François Bizot, Free Press: Underground & Alternative Publications 1965–1975 (New York: Universe, 2006); Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube. 85. Anna Nieto Gomez, “Chicana Print Culture and Chicana Studies: A Testimony to the Development of Chicana Feminist Culture,” in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, ed. Gabriela F. Arredondo et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 93. 86. Ferriss, Sandoval, and Hembree, The Fight in the Fields, 80–82. 87. Lewels, The Uses of the Media by the Chicano Movement, 17. 88. Margaret Werner Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850–1984 (Washington, D.C: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1987), 35. 89. Glenn C. Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 5. 90. Alan Eladio Gómez, “‘Nuestras Vidas Corren Casi Paralels’: Chicanos, Independistas, and the Prison Rebellions in Leavenworth, 1969–1972,” in Behind Bars: Latino/as and Prison in the United States, ed. Suzanne Oboler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 67–96. 91. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “Rasquachismo: a Chicano Sensibility,” in Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold Del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, 1991), 155. 92. Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (London: Verso, 1997), 49. 93. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 32–36. 94. Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Norma Alarcón, “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘The’ Native Woman,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 62–71; Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 95. Dolores Huerta, “Dolores Huerta: Un Soldado Del Movimiento,” in With These Hands: Women Working on the Land (New York: Feminist Press, 1981), 216. 96. José Antonio Villareal, Pocho (New York: Anchor, 1959), 186. 97. Ibid., 187. 98. Vasquez’s writings are one of the underappreciated gems of 1960s political expression (see Enriqueta Vasquez, Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: Writings from “El Grito Del Norte,” ed. Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza [Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006]).

210 / notes 99. See Moctezuma Esparza’s Walkout! (2004) for a filmic representation of the energy and enthusiasm that made La Piranya a bedrock of the Chicano movement. It bears noting that many of these movement spaces have long since disappeared. The property that once held the Crusade for Justice building, for example, is now a post office. Fragments of progressive history are lost when these spaces change hands or are destroyed, but lively progressive locales such as these remain spread out all over the country, including Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. 100. For a smart and in-depth study of the exceedingly complex relationship between cultural nationalism and socialism within the Chicano movement, see George Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965–1975 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 53–96. 101. Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 102. Antonio Gomez, “Un Solo Mundo,” Con Safos, March 4, 1970. 103. Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, “Brown Power to Brown People: Radical Ethnic Nationalism, the Black Panthers, and Latino Radicalism, 1967–1973,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, ed. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru R. Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 255. 104. Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 111–12.

2 / Green Aztlán 1. For historical background on the first Earth Day and on the postwar environmental movement generally, see Bill Christofferson, The Man from Clear Lake: Earth Day Founder Gaylord Nelson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); and Samuel P. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). See also the Robert Stone documentary cited below. 2. Leslie Kaufman, “On 40th Anniversary, Earth Day Is Big Business,” New York Times, April 22, 2010, www.lexisnexis.com/. 3. Robert Stone, Earth Days (WGBH Educational Foundation and Robert Stone Productions, 2009), www.pbs.org. My thanks to Denis Hayes and Arturo Sandoval for their invaluable background information. 4. Matthew Whittaker, Gary M. Segura, and Shaun Bowler, “Racial/Ethnic Group Attitudes toward Environmental Protection in California: Is ‘Environmentalism’ Still a White Phenomenon?,” Political Research Quarterly 58, no. 3 (September 2005): 435–47. 5. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990). 6. Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll, eds., “To Love the Wind and Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Stacy Kowtko, Nature and the Environment in Pre-Columbian American Life (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 2006); Devon G. Peña and Ruben O. Martinez, “The Capitalist Tool, the Lawless, and the Violent: A Critique of Recent Southwestern Environmental History,” in Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 25–57. Calling these histories “environmentalist” is something of an anachronism, since the

notes / 211 term implies a self-reflexiveness that did not exist before the twentieth century. They belong instead to what James Scott calls the “infrapolitics of the powerless,” smallscale strategies of survival that relied on local knowledge and transitory opportunities (see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990], 199). 7. Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 74; Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Devon Gerardo Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin, Tex.: Center for Mexican American Studies, 1997); Devon Gerardo Peña, ed., Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking across the Divide,” in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 282–94; Priscilla Ybarra, “‘Lo Que Quiero Es Tierra’: Longing and Belonging in Cherríe Moraga’s Ecological Vision,” in New Perspectives on Environmental Justice : Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, ed. Rachel Stein (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 240–48; Alejandro Lugo, Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism, and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Priscilla Solis Ybarra, “Borderlands as Bioregion: Jovita González, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the Twentieth-Century Ecological Revolution in the Rio Grande Valley,” MELUS: MultiEthnic Literature of the U.S. 34, no. 2 (2009): 175–89; Sharada Balachandran Orihuela and Andrew Carl Hageman, “The Virtual Realities of US/Mexico Border Ecologies in Maquilapolis and Sleep Dealer,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 2 (2011): 166–89. 8. During the Chicano movement, activists were typically careful to distinguish white allies from white enemies. As Elizabeth Martínez and Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez explained in their influential history of Mexican Americans: “The word gringo may come from griego, a Spanish term for foreigner. In any case, the word came to represent a racist mentality, a way of life that oppresses and exploits others. We might mention here that while all gringos are Anglo, not all Anglos are gringos.” This distinction made the news in 1969 when the firebrand José Angel Gutiérrez gave a televised speech in which he said that Chicanos/as should “kill the gringo.” Gutiérrez later said he was referring to a racist mind-set, but clearly he wanted to draw media attention to the Chicano/a cause by stoking cultural paranoia about Mexican rebellion and white vulnerability (see Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez and Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez, Viva La Raza! The Struggle of the Mexican-American People [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974], 89; and Armando Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995], 100, 171). 9. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20. 10. Ibid., 259. 11. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., “Environmentalist.” 12. Earth Day: A Question of Survival, CBS News, April 22, 1970. The University of Wisconsin’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Study has a transcript of this broadcast at the following address: www.nelsonearthday.net/collection/422–CBSspecialtranscript.htm. As of this writing, the report can also be viewed on YouTube.

212 / notes 13. Stone, Earth Days. 14. Jake Kosek, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 155. 15. Ibid., 156. 16. Kosek, Understories, 156. 17. Denis Cosgrove, “Habitable Earth: Wilderness, Empire, and Race in America,” in Wild Ideas, ed. David Rothenberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 26–41. 18. Richard Nixon: “Special Message to the Congress on Problems of Population Growth,” July 18, 1969, available online at Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2132. 19. See, for example, the March 3, 1970, broadcast of the NBC program First Tuesday, which made apocalyptic projections of what life would be like in the year 2000; the May 31, 1970, episode on overpopulation by the producers of the short-lived NBC series In Which We Live; and the January 6, 1973, ABC special report entitled Population: Boom or Doom?, which looked at the findings of President Nixon’s Committee on Population Growth and the American Future. 20. Scott Thurber, “Earth Day Gets Sweeping Sendoff in Bay Area,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 23, 1970. 21. Joseph Lelyveld, “Mood Is Joyful as City Gives Its Support,” New York Times, April 23, 1970. 22. Bob Packwood, “Stop at Two,” in Earth Day—the Beginning: A Guide for Survival (New York: Bantam, 1970), 199. 23. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968), xi. 24. Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb Revisited,” Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (Summer 2009), www.ejsd.org/ public/journal_article/10. 25. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 15. 26. Ibid., 16, italics in the original. 27. Paul R. Ehrlich, Loy Bilderback, and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Golden Door: International Migration, Mexico, and the United States (New York: Ballantine, 1979), 327. 28. Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 86, 93. 29. Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, ed. Max L. Moorhead (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 141. For a full-length study of these perceptions, see also Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). 30. FAIR recently made headlines when the New York Times profiled leader John Tanton. A founder of the modern anti-immigrant movement, Tanton was recorded telling a donor that “one of my prime concerns is about the decline of folks who look like you and me,” and elsewhere wondering if Latin Americans will “bring with them the tradition of the mordida” (bribe). FAIR has since scrubbed him from their website, but Tanton’s remarks highlight the insidious racism within the anti-immigrant coalition (see Jason DeParle, “The Anti-Immigrant Crusader,” New York Times, April 17, 2011).

notes / 213 31. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, “Arizona State University Speech,” in Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, ed. Antonio Esquibel (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001), 50. 32. Enriqueta Vasquez, “Smog and Money Politics,” in Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: El Grito Del Norte Writings, ed. Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006), 154. 33. Kosek, Understories. 34. Vasquez, “Smog and Money Politics,” 154. 35. Enriqueta Vasquez, “La Chicana: Let’s Build a New Life,” in Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: El Grito Del Norte Writings, ed. Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006), 114. 36. Lorena Oropeza, “Viviendo y Luchando: The Life and Times of Enriqueta Vasquez,” in Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: El Grito Del Norte Writings, ed. Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006), xxvi. 37. Ibid., xxx–xxxi. 38. Iris Keltz, Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie: Tribal Tales from the Heart of a Cultural Revolution (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, n.d.), 78. 39. Vasquez, “La Chicana: Let’s Build a New Life,” 114–15. 40. Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 33–37. 41. This pamphlet was adapted and published as the introduction to Jack D. Forbes, Aztecas Del Norte: The Chicanos of Aztlan (Greenwich, Ct.: Fawcett, 1973). 42. John R. Chavez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 141. 43. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner, eds., “El Plan Espiritual De Aztlan,” in Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature (New York: Knopf, 1972), 402–3. 44. Ibid., 405. 45. Ibid., 404. 46. Lee Bebout, Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 173. 47. Valdez and Steiner, “El Plan Espiritual De Aztlan,” 403, 405. 48. See, for example, Norma Alarcón, “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘The’ Native Woman,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 62–71; Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, “I Throw Punches for My Race, but I Don’t Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—Chica-nos (Girl, Us)/Chicanas—into the Movement Script,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 81–95; Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (Cambridge, Mass: South End Press, 2000); Laura Elisa Pérez, “El Desorden, Nationalism, and Chicana/o Aesthetics,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 19–46. 49. Dionne Espinoza, “‘Revolutionary Sisters’: Women’s Solidarity and Collective Identification among Chicana Brown Berets in East Los Angeles, 1967–1970,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 26, no. 1 (November 1, 2001): 42.

214 / notes 50. Enriqueta Vasquez, “La Santa Tierra,” in Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: El Grito Del Norte Writings, ed. Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006), 56. 51. Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice, 85. 52. Ibid., 115. 53. Ann Aurelia López, The Farmworkers’ Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 120. 54. For more on Tijerina’s life and on Alianza, see Peter Nabokov, Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969); F. Arturo Rosales, Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996); Reies López Tijerina, They Called Me “King Tiger”: My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights, ed. José Angel Gutiérrez (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000); Richard Gardner, Grito! Reies Tijerina and the New Mexico Land Grant War of 1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). 55. Nabokov, Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid, 65. 56. Ibid., 204. 57. Tijerina, They Called Me “King Tiger,” 49, 57. 58. Rosales, Chicano!, 169. 59. Frances Leon Swadesh, “Structure of Hispanic-Indian Relations in New Mexico,” in The Survival of Spanish American Villages (Colorado Springs: Research Committee, Colorado College, 1979); Nabokov, Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid, 217, 223. 60. Nabokov, Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid, 182–83. 61. Kosek, Understories, 14. 62. Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice, 127. 63. Nabokov, Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid, 65. 64. Oropeza, “Viviendo y Luchando: The Life and Times of Enriqueta Vasquez,” xxxi. Escuela Tlatelolco still operates today as a progressive charter school in northwest Denver. 65. Bunyan Bryant, “History and Issues of the Environmental Justice Movement,” in Our Backyard: A Quest for Environmental Justice (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 6. 66. Rodolfo Gonzales, I Am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem (Toronto: Bantam , 1972), 6. 67. Ibid., 100. 68. Ibid., 82. 69. Daniel Valdez, América De Los Indios, Rolas De Aztlán: Songs of the Chicano Movement (Smithsonian Folkways, 2005). According to Smithsonian Folkways, the 1974 Mestizo album on which this song appeared was the only Movement recording to be released by a major label. 70. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 71. For two outstanding accounts of this history, see Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California, 1993); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 72. Lenny Foster, “Alcatraz Is Not an Island,” in American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk, ed. Troy Johnson, Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 129–35.

notes / 215 73. Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York: Viking, 1991). 74. Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán? Re-Writing Mestizaje, Indianism, and Chicanismo from the Lacandón,” in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodríguez (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 413. 75. Enriqueta Vasquez, Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: Writings from El Grito Del Norte, ed. Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006), 87. 76. Oropeza, “Viviendo y Luchando: The Life and Times of Enriqueta Vasquez,” xxxix. 77. Ibid. 78. Edward J. McCaughan, Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 18. 79. Shifra M. Goldman, “When the Earth(ly) Saints Come Marching In: The Life and Art of Santa Barraza,” in Santa Barraza, Artist of the Borderlands, ed. Maria Herrera-Sobek (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 51. 80. Ibid., 59. 81. Shifra Goldman and Mary-Linn Hughes, eds., Chicana Voices and Vision: A National Exhibit of Women Artists (Venice, Calif.: Social and Public Arts Resource Center, 1983), n.p. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Santa C. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography” (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 48. 85. Ibid., 49. 86. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “Santa Barraza: a Borderlands Chronicle” (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 71. 87. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 6. 88. Ybarra-Frausto, “Santa Barraza: a Borderlands Chronicle,” 71. 89. Ibid. 90. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 6. 91. Ibid., 44–45. 92. Ibid., 44. 93. McCaughan, Art and Social Movements, 83. 94. Goldman, “When the Earth(ly) Saints Come Marching In,” 59. 95. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 48. 96. Ibid., 29. 97. Ybarra-Frausto, “Santa Barraza: A Borderlands Chronicle,” 74. 98. Miguel León-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, trans. Jack Emory Davis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 53. 99. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 29. 100. Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 101. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 9, 52. 102. Tenayuca’s life and accomplishments are described in chapter 3 of Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century

216 / notes America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also Roberto R. Calderón and Emilio Zamora, “Manuela Solis Sager and Emma B. Tenayuca: A Tribute,” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. Del Castillo (Encino, Calif.: Floricanto Press, 1990), 269–279; Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology & Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Mario T. García, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 103. Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 91. 104. Mary Acton, Learning to Look at Paintings, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009), 4. 105. Goldman, “When the Earth(ly) Saints Come Marching In: The Life and Art of Santa Barraza,” 65. The reference to “a new state of consciousness” above is from María Herrera-Sobek, introduction to Santa Barraza: Artist of the Borderlands (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2001), xxvii–xxviii. 106. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 4. 107. Martin Kemp, ed., The Oxford History of Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 60–61. 108. Art historians use the word “naturalism” to describe this style, but readers should not confuse it with literary naturalism, a more recent style that emphasizes nature’s determining power over human experience. 109. Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture, 91. 110. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin, 1972), 87. 111. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 44. 112. Małgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). Oleszkiewicz-Peralba gives a remarkable survey of how this “the cult of the primeval African Mother/Fertility Goddess” migrated to other continents and evolved through a complex and uneven process into such figures as Mokosz in eastern and central Europe, the Iemanjá in Brazil, Ochún in Cuba, and the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico. For a discussion of blackness in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and other parts of Latin America, see De León, They Called Them Greasers, 49; Goldman, “When the Earth(ly) Saints Come Marching In,” 57; George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler, eds., Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 113. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 44–45. 114. Ibid., 44. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid. 117. Berger, Ways of Seeing. 118. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 12. 119. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Lo Del Corazón: Heartbeat of a Culture (San Francisco: Mexican Museum, 1986). Mesa-Bains uses this notion of the “instructive gaze” to describe the work of Carmen Lomas Garza, but the phrase also explains the artistic vision of her fellow-Texan Barraza.

notes / 217 120. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 7. 121. Kevin Starr, Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990–2003 (New York: Knopf, 2004), 197–207. 122. As of this writing, the ad can be screened via YouTube at the following address: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLIzzs2HHgY. 123. Barraza, “Santa C. Barraza: An Autobiography,” 7. 124. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, “Mixtec Activism in Oaxacalifornia Transborder Grassroots Political Strategies,” American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 9 (June 1, 1999): 1439–58. 125. David Rieff, “Professional Aztecs and Popular Culture,” New Perspectives Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1991): 46, 44. 126. Ibid., 44. 127. Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 23.

3 / Immigrant Actos 1. English Language Unity Act of 2011, H.R. 997, 112th Cong. (2011), http://thomas. loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.997:. 2. Brian Lyman, “Bentley Signs Off on Immigration Law Changes,” Montgomery Advertiser, May 19, 2012, www.montgomeryadvertiser.com. 3. Brian Gratton and Myron P. Gutmann, “Hispanic Population Estimates, by Sex, Race, Hispanic Origin, Residence, Nativity: 1850–1990,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition On Line, ed. Susan B. Carter and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Aa2189–2214. 4. Pew Hispanic Center, “Hispanic Population, by Nativity and Citizenship Status: 2000 and 2009,” Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States, 2009 (Washington, D.C.: Pew Hispanic Center, 2010), table 4; Jeffrey S. Passel and Paul Taylor, Unauthorized Immigrants and Their U.S.-Born Children (Washington, D.C.: Pew Hispanic Center, 2010), 1. 5. Mark Hugo Lopez, Rich Morin, and Paul Taylor, Illegal Immigration Backlash Worries, Divides Latinos (Washington, D.C.: Pew Hispanic Center, 2010), ii–iii. 6. Ibid. 7. On the complex racial hierarchies in the Spanish and Mexican borderlands, see David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California, 1993). 8. David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Cynthia Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). 9. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 162. 10. Ibid., 196–99; Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 140–41. 11. Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 12. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 4.

218 / notes 13. May Joseph, Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 14. Susan Ferriss, Ricardo Sandoval, and Diana Hembree, The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 108–13. 15. El Teatro Campesino. Special Collections, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, University of California, Santa Barbara. El Teatro Campesino Series 14, Box 1, Folder 2. A more direct but less poetic translation of the Spanish would be: “a vocal and dramatic public forum for expressing not only the present grievances of our struggle, but also the desires and dreams of the laboring farmworker people.” 16. Yolanda Parra, interview by Yolanda Broyles-González, December 1982, p. 21, transcript, Yolanda Broyles-González and Fernando González Collection, Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University, College Station. 17. Yolanda Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 33. 18. Ibid., 6. 19. Ibid., 29. 20. Ibid., 37. 21. Nicolás Kanellos, A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 2. 22. José E. Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 23. Kanellos, A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States, 42. On the history Mexican repatriation during the Great Depression, see Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors. 24. Harry Elam, Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 123. 25. For a sophisticated and compelling account of how “El Teatro Campesino, Inc.” evolved and what that evolution means within the broader narrative of the El Teatro Campesino, see chapter 4 of Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino. 26. I would go so far as to say that current conversations about organic foods and about local farming owe a modest but direct debt to the work El Teatro Campesino did in expanding awareness of farm labor. 27. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3. 28. Ibid., 11. 29. Ibid., 229. 30. The useful phrase “necrocitizenship” is from Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 31. Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos (Fresno, Calif.: Cucaracha Press, 1971), 144. 32. Ibid., 145. 33. Ibid. 34. Ann Aurelia López, The Farmworkers’ Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Many would no doubt object to the idea that we underpay for groceries, but if Americans feel burdened by food costs it is because wages are too low, not because prices are too high.

notes / 219 35. Daniel Rothenberg, With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 67. 36. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 92. 37. Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 160. 38. Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement, 14. 39. Olivia Chumacero, interview by Yolanda Broyles-González, 19 January 1983, p. 6, transcript, Yolanda Broyles-González and Fernando González Collection, Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University, College Station. 40. Ibid., 48. 41. Ibid. 42. Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos, 1. 43. Ralph J. Gleason, “Vital, Earthy and Alive Theater,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 4, 1966. 44. Felipe Cantú and Agustín Lira, interview by Yolanda Broyles-González, 22 March 1983, p. 3, transcript, Yolanda Broyles-González and Fernando González Collection, Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University, College Station. 45. Rothenberg, With These Hands, 28. 46. Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos, 2. On El Teatro Campesino as a theater of social transformation, see Elam, Taking It to the Streets. 47. Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos, 22. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 23. 50. Ibid., 27. 51. Ibid., 23. 52. Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farm Workers, 1769–1913 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 268. 53. Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos, 22. 54. Ibid., 27. 55. Street, Beasts of the Field, 268. 56. Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos, 4. 57. Ibid., 24. 58. Ibid., 33. 59. Ibid., 24. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 29. 62. Ibid., 30. 63. Ibid., 31. 64. Ibid., 32. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 34. 67. Ibid. 68. See chapter 2 for a full description of the Aztlán mythology and its place in the Chicano movement. 69. Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement, 85, 242–43. On neo-indigenism, see Chon A. Noriega, “Between a Weapon and a Formula:

220 / notes Chicano Cinema and Its Contexts,” in Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 151; and Victor ZamudioTaylor, “Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism,” in The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001), 342–57. 70. Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement, 122, 135. 71. Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, 11. 72. For a detailed qualitative and quantitative overview of changes in the agriculture industry over the last one hundred years, see Bruce L. Gardner, American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 73. Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos, 107. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 118. 76. Ibid., 109. 77. Ibid., 110. 78. Ibid., 116. 79. Ibid., 130. 80. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 81. Stan Steiner, La Raza: The Mexican Americans (New York: Harper, 1970), 271. 82. Street, Beasts of the Field, 338. 83. Ibid., 604–14. 84. Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4. 85. Let me note as an aside that California is a case study of the historical and political limits of our current tendency to divide the United States up into “blue states” and “red states.” This media-generated rhetoric is an intellectual crutch that obscures more than it reveals about how we got into our political crisis and how to get out. 86. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 13. 87. Ibid., 32. 88. El Teatro Campesino was an equal-opportunity satirist, for while Democrats were not as culpable as Republicans, they too played a part in reproducing inequality. Democrat Pat Brown was governor of California when the United Farm Workers marched from Delano to Sacramento in the spring of 1966, and it was he who was parodied by El Teatro Campesino for his foot-dragging on farm labor legislation. Like African Americans, Chicanos and Chicanas had many reasons to be frustrated with Democrats. They took exception to the party’s stalling on civil rights, its support for harsh immigration policies, and later to its escalation of the war in Vietnam. El Teatro Campesino critiqued liberal complicity in restrictive citizenship with The Militants, a 1969 acto about two foolhardy Chicano militants invited to speak at the University of California by Dr. Bolillo (in Mexican Spanish, slang for white bread). For Dr. Bolillo, an ambassador of institutional liberalism, the Chicano movement is an opportunity to be seen as a progressive leader, and one that requires little sacrifice. Replacing action with melodrama, Dr. Bolillo finds pleasure in a masochistic

notes / 221 purging of his own guilt. For their part, “Chicano #1” and “Chicano #2” are able to indulge their vanity, ultimately killing each other in an effort to demonstrate who is more committed to the cause. The Militants is El Teatro Campesino’s clearest condemnation of rubbernecking and adventurism as substitutes for meaningful activism. 89. Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos, 36. 90. One historian suggests that Mexican Americans may have been frustrated by Governor Pat Brown’s seeming unconcern about their communities, or they may have resented what they saw as Democratic favoritism toward blacks. If true, the latter is a particularly shameful and self-destructive rationale for supporting Reagan, but the evidence leaves room for uncertainty (see Kurt Schuparra, Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 1945–1966 [Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998], 139–41). 91. Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos, 120. 92. Ibid., 9. 93. Ibid., 11. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 14. 96. Ibid., 17. 97. Ibid., 18. 98. Castronovo, Necro Citizenship, 1. The reference above to “social death” is from Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 99. Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 100. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973). 101. Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos, 13. 102. Ibid., 11. 103. Ibid., 10. 104. Ibid., 14. 105. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 46. 106. Deborah J. Schildkraut, Press One for English: Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 14. 107. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890., 198. 108. Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 6. 109. Sandín argues that this carefully controlled anger defines Latinos and Latinas as a group (see Killing Spanish: Literary Essays on Ambivalent U.S. Latino/a Identity [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], 100). 110. Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam, 2004).

222 / notes 4 / After Words 1. Ignacio M. García, “Juncture in the Road: Chicano Studies since ‘El Plan de Santa Barbara,’” in Chicanas/Chicanos at the Crossroads: Social, Economic, and Political Change (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 194, 186. 2. Ibid., 189–90. 3. Ibid., 202. 4. Lorena Oropeza, “Making History: The Chicano Movement,” in Voices of a New Chicana/o History, ed. Refugio I. Rochín and Dennis N. Valdés (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 222. To be fair, García attempts a distinction between the bad feminists and the good feminists, applauding the latter for fixing male chauvinism in the movement. It is faint praise, though. As Oropeza notes in her thorough reply, “lesbian-feminism” is the only “brand” of feminism he engaged in any detail. 5. Norma Alarcón, “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘The’ Native Woman,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 64. 6. It bears noting that these dynamics are not unique to the Chicano movement, as nationalist campaigns have long given women opportunities to participate in the political process, even though these opportunities are often highly supervised and usually only temporary. 7. Ana Castillo, So Far from God: A Novel (New York: Norton, 2005); Reyna Grande, Across a Hundred Mountains: A Novel (New York: Atria, 2006); Denise Chávez, Loving Pedro Infante (New York: Washington Square Press, 2002); Alex Espinoza, Still Water Saints: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2007); Yxta Maya Murray, The Queen Jade: A Novel (New York: Rayo, 2005); Demetria Martínez, Mother Tongue (New York: One World, 1996). This chapter focuses on the tradition of Chicana fiction, but there exists also an impressive canon of poetry and theater that includes the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Pat Mora, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and many others. 8. For an insightful initial inquiry into the significance of these imprints, see Marta E. Sánchez, “Para español oprima el número dos: Transnational Translation and U.S. Latina/o Literature,” in Imagined Transnationalism: U.S. Latino/a Literature, Culture, and Identity, ed. Kevin Concannon, Francisco A. Lomelí, and Marc Priewe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 47–60. These imprints deserve a book-length cultural history. 9. These works have been finding readers. Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus have sold an impressive number of copies. Major Chicana feminist texts are often taught at the high school and college level, and even the lesser-known writers in this tradition have found small but loyal followings. 10. Berta Ornelas, Come Down from the Mound (Phoenix, Ariz.: Miter, 1975); Isabella Rios, Victuum (Ventura, Calif.: Diana-Etna, 1976). 11. Sonia López, “The Role of the Chicana within the Student Movement,” in Essays on La Mujer, ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Rosa Martinez Cruz (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center Publications, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977), 20, 27. 12. “Join Womens Lib,” Con Safos, Summer 1970.

notes / 223 13. López, “The Role of the Chicana within the Student Movement,” 24–25; Maylei Blackwell, “Contested Histories: Las Hijas de Cuauhtemóc, Chicana Feminisms, and Print Culture in the Chicano Movement, 1968–1973,” in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, ed. Gabriela F Arredondo et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 74–77. 14. Marguerite V. Marin, Social Protest in an Urban Barrio: A Study of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1974 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991); Mary S. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 33. 15. George Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965–1975 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). 16. Drawing on the work of Robin D. G. Kelley, Cynthia Young argues that Chicanos/as and other members of the “U.S. Third World Left” were influenced by the southern black activists who appropriated Stalin’s argument about the “Black Belt” during the 1930s (see Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left [Durham: Duke University Press, 2006], 154–55). The fact that progressive activists would cite Stalin in support of minority rights is one of those tragic ironies that happen again and again in human history. 17. For a thorough and insightful account of how this masculinist ideology came to dominate the Chicano movement and what impact it has had on feminist and queer politics, see Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 18. Ibid. 19. For background on the Brown Beret organization, see Marin, Social Protest in an Urban Barrio: A Study of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1974; Francisco A. Rosales, Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arté Público Press, 1996); Ernesto B. Vigil, The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Armando Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, “Brown Power to Brown People: Radical Ethnic Nationalism, the Black Panthers, and Latino Radicalism, 1967–1973,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, ed. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru R. Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 252–86. 20. Among the more famous figures of Chicano/a history, pachucos were Mexican American youth who participated in the multiracial youth subcultures in Los Angeles, New York, and other metropolitan areas. In 1943, Los Angeles “zoot-suiters” (as they were also called) were involved in a riot with a group of white Marines and sailors stationed downtown. During the 1960s and 1970s, José Montoya’s unforgettable poem “El Louie” (1969) and other cultural texts transformed the pachuco into a symbol of Chicano resistance. The broad appeal of this symbol was multidimensional, but some of it did have to do with the gender and sexual politics of nationalism. For an insightful take on these aspects of pachuquismo, see Catherine Sue Ramírez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). See also Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

224 / notes 21. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Basic, 2008). 22. Blackwell, “Contested Histories,” 65–66. 23. Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 200. 24. Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 45–47. See also Anna Macías, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1982). 25. Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary, 43. 26. Ibid., 44. 27. Ibid., 36, 61–62. 28. My brief sketch of Tenayuca’s life is drawn largely from chapter 3 of Zaragosa Vargas’s elegant Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also Roberto R. Calderón and Emilio Zamora, “Manuela Solis Sager and Emma B. Tenayuca: A Tribute,” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. Del Castillo (Encino, Calif.: Floricanto Press, 1990), 269–79; Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology & Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 29. Public parks and plazas have a prominent place in the leftist history of Latinos/ as in the United States and in Latin America. They inspired a tremendous amount of activism during the 1960s and 1970s, as Chicano/a communities tried to defend public spaces against the neoliberal push for privatization. They were also the location of several key movement events, including the large antiwar “Chicano Moratorium” that took place on August 29, 1970, at Laguna Park in East Los Angeles. The use of public space by Latinos/as continues to be a source of anxiety for some and empowerment for others. 30. Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 9, 52. 31. Ibid., 57. 32. Emma Tenayuca and Homer Brooks, “The Mexican Question in the Southwest,” in Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 162. 33. Ibid., 158, 161. 34. García, Mexican Americans, 154. 35. Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 138. The quotation below is from Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 120. 36. Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2002), 288. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the chapter text. 37. Cisneros translates the father’s cry as: “Another dame! Now how am I going to take care of this one?” 38. I focus in this chapter on how Cisneros draws on the tradition of Chicana feminism to challenge conventional thinking about Latinas, and to carry Chicano movement politics into the twenty-first century. Caramelo is also inventive in its reworking

notes / 225 of the mythologies surrounding U.S. immigration. Stock narratives of our “melting pot” nation suggest that ethnics assimilate into American culture only after their meek parents suffer a lifetime of cultural disorientation and longing for home. An immigrant in her own land, Celaya’s mother defies this cliché with her confidence, humor, and intelligence. So too does Celaya’s father, a Mexican in America who makes himself at home in the borderlands between two nations. Cisneros is writing in a counternarrative tradition that includes Ernesto Galarza’s great memoir Barrio Boy, which writes back to those “psychologists, psychiatrists, social anthropologists and other manner of ‘shrinks’” who think that “a Mexican doesn’t know what he is; and if by chance he is something, it isn’t any good.” Galarza comically replies that “I, for one Mexican, never had any doubts on this score” (see Ernesto Galarza, Barrio Boy [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971], 2). 39. Marta Cotera, “Our Feminist Heritage,” in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. Alma M. Garcia (New York: Routledge, 1997), 41–44. The editor of this volume indicates that Cotera presented this text as a speech in 1973 and later published it as part of an independent press publication in 1977. It should be noted for the record that Chicana feminists also read The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique. 40. Armando Rendón, Chicano Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 170. 41. The feminist reimagining of Doña Marina (as she is also called) has spanned the last thirty years and has been influential beyond the boundaries of Chicano/a politics (see Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature from History to Myth [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991]). 42. Adelaida R. Del Castillo, “Malintzín Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective,” Encuentro Femenil 1, no. 2 (1974): 58. 43. Lorna Dee Cervantes, “Para Un Revolucionario,” in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. Alma M. Garcia (New York: Routledge, 1997), 74–75. 44. “Resolutions from the Chicana Workshop,” in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. Alma M. Garcia (New York: Routledge, 1997), 147. 45. Rolas de Aztlán (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways, 2005). See page 9 of the liner notes to this album for the complete story of “Yo soy Chicano.” 46. Sandra Soto interprets Iturbide’s photo as a playful ethnography that valorizes the queer indigenous cultures of southern Mexico (Sandra Soto, “Feeling Greater Mexico,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Vancouver, B.C., April 2011). 47. The phrase “greater Mexico” comes from noted Chicano writer, musician, and ethnographer Américo Paredes. 48. There is a long and impressive bibliography on Latinos/as in film and its impact on contemporary politics. See Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Clara Rodriguez, Heroes, Lovers, and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Mary C. Beltran, Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom (University of Illinois Press, 2009); and Isabel Molina-Guzman, Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media (New York: New York University Press, 2010). My thanks to the anonymous reader at NYU Press for drawing my attention to several of these texts.

226 / notes 49. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 50. Emily Martin’s work on disease and immunity helps understand the “flexible” push/pull dynamic that allows for the flexible incorporation of some Mexicans and some Arabs, alongside the rejection of others (see Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS [Boston: Beacon Press, 1994]).

Index

Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 24, 83, 173, 201n74, 206n29; The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), 201n74; Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), 24, 201n74 affirmative action, 13, 18, 19, 42, 173 Africa, 122, 123, 141 African Americans: Chicano/Latino relations with, 5, 13, 16, 51, 72–73, 122–23, 175, 199n37, 204n11; civil rights movement, 2, 13, 16, 28, 48–49, 62–63, 199n37, 220n88; inequality, 11–12, 42. See also under Aztlán; environmentalism; network news agricultural industry: contractors, 151–54; corporatization of, 145, 153, 156, 163–64, 220n72; environmental damage, 156; “ethnic succession,” 145–46, 166 Alianza Federal de Mercedes. See Hispanos Alicia, Juana, 88, 98, 107 Alinsky, Saul, 52, 201n74 Alurista, 24, 96–98 Anzaldúa, Gloria: activism of, 21, 32; Chicano movement and, 2, 171; environmentalism, 87; impact, 129, 222n7; indigenous thought and, 120, 128–29; This Bridge Called My Back, 2, 128 Arab Americans, 41, 195, 226n49 art: Byzantine, 121; Chicano movement and, 2, 14, 32–33, 35–36; classical,

121, 136; definition of, 2, 334n2; environmentalism and, 88, 101–2, 125–26, 129–30; historical memory and, 2, 14, 16; Renaissance, 119, 121–22, 125, 194; social movements and, 39, 43, 139–40; society and, 33, 39, 121–22 Asco, 34 Asian Americans, 52, 133–34, 140 Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), 51 August Twenty-Ninth Movement, 57 Aztlán: African Americans and, 123; environmentalism, 88, 158; feminism, 174, 187–88; immigration and, 155; nationalism and, 24, 26, 175, 179–80; Native Americans and, 107; origins of, 95–98 Baca, Judy, 35, 88, 107, 111 Barraza, Santa: biography, 108–9; Black Madonna (1991–1992), 122–23, 124; Coatlicue (1986), 117, 119; Emma Tenayuca Codex (1993), 117–21; environmentalism, 40, 85, 88–89, 125; feminism, 109, 111–12, 117; indigenous themes, 107, 112–17, 119–30; Los Migrantes (1972), 109–10; Nepantla, 126–30; Renacimiento/Rebirth (1980), 112–14, 116, 117; Retablo of Mestizaje Codex (1991), 115–17, 122; Soldaderas (1972), 109

228 / index Brecht, Bertolt, 137, 153 Brown Berets, 160, 175, 176, 188, 223n19 Brown, Pat, 52 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 51 Bush, George W., 18, 29, 31 Cantú, Felipe, 147, 148 Castillo, Ana, 32, 35, 171, 174, 222n9 Castro, Sal, 75 Catholicism: Chicano activism and, 23, 36; colonialism and, 122, 123, 195; rhetoric of, 10, 115; Virgin of Guadalupe, 82, 112–14, 117, 126, 183, 216n112 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 186–87, 222n7 Chávez, César: cultural nationalism, 78; early life and career, 12, 52, 98; El Teatro Campesino, 134, 138–39, 159, 161; leadership, 36, 76, 100, 171; immigration, 133; Synanon and, 55; television and, 45–46, 52–55, 67, 205n23, 205n25 Chavez, Linda, 18–19 Chavez Ortiz, Ricardo, 58 Chicano/a environmentalism: feminism, 93–94; mainstream environmentalism and, 39–40, 87–88; philosophy of, 88, 93–94, 100–102, 128, 158; romanticism in, 104, 106; visual arts and, 39, 104–6 Chicano Liberation Front, 56–57 Chicano Moratorium, 26, 29, 56–60, 65–66, 78, 224n29 Chicano movement: art of (see art: Chicano movement and); Catalina invasion, 44–45, 58; “Chicano/a,” 177–78; Chicano/a history and, 26; conservative opposition to, 18, 64; elegies for, 20–28, 30–31, 36, 170–73; fiction and poetry, 35, 69–70, 102–3, 172–74, 222n7 (see also Cisneros, Sandra); film, 20–21, 35, 39, 46, 68, 70–76, 85, 118, 209n82, 225n48; immigration, 2, 23, 30–31, 33, 38; international impact, 78; music, 14–16, 24, 35, 88, 101, 102, 104, 146, 189, 197n2, 199n39, 214n69; police involvement, 56– 61, 65; “post-movement” generations, 27, 37; prison activism, 56, 78–79; school walkouts, 21, 45, 66, 75; success of, 2, 16, 30–33, 38, 41, 130, 172, 196; theater 35, 40, 88, 95, 101, 102, 140, 222n7 (see also El Teatro Campesino); in U.S. history,

12–14, 33, 46, 51–52; violence and, 56–57, 62–63, 100; visual arts, 104–6 Chicano/a press: cultural nationalism, 39, 68, 77–80, 84; historical precedents, 71, 80; mass media and, 46, 67–70, 81, 85; production values, 79, 83–84 Chicano/a studies, 6, 35–38, 170. See also higher education Chicano Youth Liberation Conference (1969), 24, 45, 66, 96, 174, 177, 178 Chumacero, Olivia, 147 Cisneros, Sandra: Caramelo (2002), 172, 181–96; Chicano movement and, 32, 41, 171, 196; education, 174; feminism, 32, 41, 182, 184, 185, 191, 196; House on Mango Street (1984), 172, 174, 181, 222n9; transnational politics of, 41, 191, 195–96; Woman Hollering Creek, 174 Cold War, 28, 69, 133, 177, 180, 205n15 Comisión Femenil Mexican (Mexican Women’s Commission), 71, 188 Communism: Chicano movement and, 23, 64, 175, 210n100; El Teatro Campesino, 154, 161, 164; multiethnic activism and, 72–73, 180. See also conservatives: anti-communism; Tenayuca, Emma: Communist Party Community Service Organization (CSO), 51, 52 Compean, Mario, 109 Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (Mexican Worker’s Confederation), 119, 179, 180 Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española (Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples), 51, 73 conservatives: anti-communism, 25, 51, 60–61, 73, 74, 133; anti-feminism, 17; Chicano movement and, 18, 28; El Teatro Campesino and, 139; former liberals, 18–19; nativism and (see immigration: nativist movements against); 1960s, responses to, 17–20, 22, 41–43; outreach to Latinos/as, 3 consumerism: citizenship and, 142–43; environmentalism and, 40, 88, 92, 105; gender and, 112–14, 207n53; Latinos/as and, 5; television and, 65–66, 69 Corona, Bert, 73, 180 counterculture, 13, 16, 23–24, 27, 58; New Mexico and, 95: “Yippie Manifesto,” 14

index / 229 Crusade for Justice: Chicano/a press and, 77, 83; coalitions, 100; environmentalism and, 93, 101; 189, 210n99; Escuela Tlatelolco, 101; women in, 188, 189; Wounded Knee and, 106–7. See also Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky” Cuba: Castro, Fidel, 139; Chicano movement and, 44, 64, 99; Mariel boatlift, 128 cultural nationalism: chicanismo, 30, 171; Chicano/a press and, 77–80, 84; class and, 129; “El plan spiritual de Aztlán,” 96; environmentalism, 96–98, 102–3; feminism, 32, 36, 80–81, 97, 171–72, 174–88, 191, 222n6; homophobia and, 21, 32, 36, 176; immigration and, 30; machismo, 97, 103, 174–75; Marxism and, 84, 175, 210n100; prisons and, 78–79; television and, 206n41. See also under gays and lesbians culture industry, 2, 20, 33–34, 39, 174. See also mass media de Beauvoir, Simone, 186, 201n74, 225n39 Democratic party: El Teatro Campesino and, 220n88; immigration and, 126, 142, 194; Latino/a electorate and, 3, 221n90; 1960s and, 17, 29 Desiga, Daniel, 88, 105–6 Domínguez, Lydia, 189 East Los Angeles, 14–15, 21, 56–60, 64–65, 160, 224n29 Ehrlich, Paul, 92–93 El Centro de Acción Social y Autónoma (The Center for Autonomous Social Action), 177, 188 “El plan espiritual de Aztlán,” 24, 26, 96–98 El Teatro Campesino: actos, 40, 134, 135, 136–37, 138, 140, 148; aesthetic of, 135–37, 148–49, 153, 164–65; audiences and 152, 168–69; Aztlán and, 155; conflicts within, 134; decline of, 139; education and, 82; farmworkers and, 12, 134, 136, 138, 140, 146–47, 148–49, 155, 169; indigenous and, 136–37, 154–55; La quinta temporada (1966), 149–55; Las dos caras del patroncito (1965), 161–65; Los vendidos (1967), 158, 160–61; mainstream theater and, 135, 136, 148;

No saco nada de la escuela (1969), 82; origins of, 134–37; performative citizenship, 40, 134, 141, 147–49, 155–56, 158, 161, 166–70; sexism in, 154; Soldado Razo (1971), 143–44; United Farm Workers and, 134, 138–39, 140, 164; Vietnam Campesino (1970), 156–58; Vietnam War, 143, 156–58, 220n88. See also Communism: El Teatro Campesino; Valdez, Luis environmentalism: African Americans and 87, 90; Earth Day, 39, 86, 89, 94, 101, 210n1; history of, 89–90, 95; impact of, 39, 42; Latinos/and, 87; racism within, 40, 90–91; romanticism and, 89, 114, 120; United Farm Workers and, 39, 128; “zero population growth,” 40, 87, 91–93, 106 Esparza, Moctezuma, 35, 74 Fanon, Frantz, 79, 201n74 feminism: Chicano/a press, 25, 77; Chicano/a studies, 36; cultural nationalism, 30, 41, 56, 80–81, 97, 171–72, 174–88, 190–91, 222n6, 222n16–17; environmentalism and, 40, 93–94; indigenous thought and, 108; malinche, 173, 186, 225n41; 1960s and, 19, 28; reproductive rights, 32, 42; successes of, 32, 36, 41, 42, 172, 180, 222n4; “third-wave,” 32; video and, 75, 208n80; Vietnam and, 84–85 Forbes, Jack, 96 Freire, Paulo, 57, 79, 201n74 Friedan, Betty, 186, 201n74, 225n39 Galindo, Hermila, 177–78, 186, 191 Garcia, Bobby, 107 García, Ignacio M., 36–38, 170–71 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 21, 32, 36, 174 gays and lesbians: activism by, 2, 36, 42, 70, 180; Chicano/a studies, 170; cultural nationalism, 21, 30, 32, 41, 80–81, 176; marginalization of, 2, 21, 32, 117, 223n17 Gitlin, Todd, 16, 27 Goldwater, Barry, 43, 160 Gonzales, Henry, 64 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky”: coalitions, 84, 100; early life of, 98; environmentalism and, 93, 102–3; leadership debates and, 26, 171; Los revolucionarios, 189; Yo soy Joaquín (1967), 102–3, 106. See also Crusade for Justice

230 / index Govea, Jessica, 98 Gramsci, Antonio, 34 Guerrero, Mark, 35 Gutiérrez, José Angel, 21, 24, 27; leadership debates and, 26, 171; MAYO and, 109; television and, 56, 58

Kahlo, Frida, 111–12 Kennedy, John F., 3, 16, 17, 19–20, 63 Kennedy, Robert F., 53 Kennedy, Ted, 3, 138 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 16, 48, 53, 54, 57, 138–39, 201n74, 205n25

Hart-Cellar Act (Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965), 9, 141, 142, 188 Hernandez, Ester, 88, 98, 105 Hernandez v. Texas (1954), 51 higher education, 11, 33, 36–37, 76–77, 82, 106. See also Chicano/a studies Hinojosa, Rolando, 35 Hispanics. See Latinos/as Hispanos (New Mexico): Alianza Federal de Mercedes, 56, 67, 76, 78, 214n54; environmentalism and, 87, 98–101, 130; television and, 67; territorial claims by, 56, 94, 98–101; Tierra Amarilla, 99–100. See also Tijerina, Reies López historiography, 2, 16, 31 Hoover, J. Edgar, 176 Huerta, Dolores, 157, 171; early career of, 12, 52; education, 82; leadership, 55, 78, 188

La Conferencia de Mujeres por La Raza (1971), 175 La Prensa Asociada Hispano-Americana, 71 La Raza Unida Party, 21, 24, 26, 66, 109, 188 Latinos/as: American South and, 4; conservatism among, 64, 95, 221n90; as consumers, 5–6; demographics, 2–10, 29–30, 42, 132, 202n88; environmentalism and, 87; labeling of, 27; latinidad, 30; middle-class and, 31; Puerto Ricans, 8, 79; racial identification and, 3, 8, 42, 132–33, 191–96; schools and, 6, 13, 82; theater by, 71–72, 137; U.S. Census Bureau and, 3–6, 9; in U.S. history, 7–8, 36, 70–71, 78, 92–93. See also under African Americans League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 133 León-Portilla, Miguel, 117, 201n74 Lira, Agustin, 138, 148 Lomas Garza, Carmen, 35, 88, 107, 108, 112 Longoria, Felix, 51 Lopez, Yolanda, 35, 107 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 34, 35 Los Quemados, 108 Los Siete la Raza, 84 Luro, Alfred, 72–73

immigration: Bracero program, 9, 49, 53, 146; Chicano movement and (see under Chicano movement); cultural nationalism and, 30; demographics and, 2–10, 29–31, 42, 132, 202n88; environmentalism and, 88; Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 (Hart-Cellar Act), 9, 40; immigration reform marches (2006), 9; law and, 8, 40, 141–48, 162–63; mythology of, 224n38; nativist movements against, 1, 7, 10, 38, 40, 92–93, 126, 128, 131–32, 145, 167–68, 194, 212n30; 1930s deportation campaign, 25, 137–38; slavery and, 162–63; U.S.Mexico border and, 7, 40, 93 internal colonialism, 34, 80, 203n92 Internet, the, 20, 29, 66, 67, 76 Iturbide, Graciela, 191, 225n46 Johnson, Lyndon B., 17, 51, 73, 141 Johnson-Reed Act (1924), 40, 141, 142. See also immigration: law

Magón, Ricardo Flores, 71, 178, 191 Malcolm X, 201n74 MALCS (Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social), 33, 37 March 25 coalition, 9 Martí, Jose, 139 Martínez, César, 108 Martínez, Elizabeth, 13, 180 Martinez, Emanuel, 107 mass media: advertising and, 33, 45, 47, 65, 125; black/Latino relations and, 5; Chicano/a press and, 67–70, 81;

index / 231 fragmentation of, 20, 29–30; 1960s and, 16, 20, 28–29, 35; public television, 73, 74; representation of civil rights movements, 13, 50–52; social movements and, 28–29, 47, 55 McCarran-Walter Act (1952), 141 McWilliams, Carey, 163, 167 MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), 22 Medina, Eliseo, 33 Mendez v. Westminster School District (1947), 51 Mesa-Bains, Amalia, 126 mestizo/a, 104, 115, 117, 120, 122, 136, 177 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), 73 Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), 18, 51 Mexican-American war (1846–1848): Chicano movement and, 175; media and, 70, 93, 207n60; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 8, 14, 25, 40, 56, 98–99 Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), 2, 35, 109, 188 Mexico: 1, 6, 9, 24, 40, 44, 49, 161; art of, 108, 115, 117; feminism in, 177–78; labor politics and, 118; Mexican Revolution, 14, 71, 177, 178, 181, 188–89, 190, 192; Oaxaca, 190, 191; popular culture of, 138; theatrical traditions, 138 Mills, C. Wright, 23, 68, 201n74 Mora, Magdalena, 177 Moraga, Cherríe, 21, 32, 87, 140, 171, 222n7 Morales, Sylvia, 35, 74, 75 Moreno, Luisa, 73 Morrison, Toni, 5, 50, 181 Mothers of East Los Angeles, 130 Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 22, 77 Muir, John, 89, 90 Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), 33, 37 Mujeres Artistas del Suroeste (MAS), 108 multiculturalism, 4, 28, 167, 173 multilingualism, 31, 166–68, 196 Muñoz, Carlos, Jr., 21, 204n11 murals, 107–8, 108, 111, 117, 189 Murrieta, Joaquín, 25 music, 78, 199n39. See also Chicano movement: music of

National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS), 37 National Council of La Raza, 73 National Farm Workers Association. See United Farm Workers Native Americans: art of, 108, 122; Aztlán and, 88, 95–98; Chicano movement and, 100, 104, 106–7, 112–15, 154; cultural survival, 169; dispossession of, 50, 91, 123, 165–66; environmentalism and, 87, 105, 106, 125–26, 128; Wounded Knee, 106–7 Navarro, Armando, 26, 27, 111, 173 neoliberalism: demographics and, 9, 11; higher education and, 77; immigration and, 142, 146, 167; inequality and, 161, 165; social activism and, 30, 43, 196 network news: African American civil rights movement and, 29, 44–45, 48–51, 53, 57–58, 62–63, 204n11, 205n23, 205n25, 206n41; archive of, 204n5; “brownout” and, 45, 49; Chicano movement and, 44–67, 206n41, 206n28; history of, 47–48; newsgathering, 50; 1960s as “golden age” of, 44, 47, 66–67; regulation and, 64 9/11 (September 11, 2001), 40, 41, 194 1960s: “baby boomers” and, 16, 31, 68–69; Chicano movement, 12–14, 26; elegies for, 20–22, 27–28, 42; as ephemeral, 1, 16, 19–22, 24, 27–28, 42; morality and, 22; New Left, 23, 27; as Oedipal conflict, 22; reexamination of, 31–32; sentimentality, 17–24; social movements, 16; success of, 16, 42, 130; underground press, 76; utopianism, 12, 22–23, 42 Nixon, Richard, 17, 19, 28, 43, 46, 63–64, 91, 157 Obama, Barack, 6, 194 Ornelas, Berta, 82, 174 pachucos/pachucas, 16, 176, 182, 223n20 Padilla, Gilbert, 12 Paredes, Américo, 119, 180 Patlán, Juan, 109 Peltier, Leonard, 106 Peña, Amado, 109 Pérez, Emma, 172

232 / index Pérez, Ignacio, 109 “Plan de Alaya,” 14 “Plan de Iguala,” 14 “Plan de San Diego,” 14 “Plan de Santa Barbara,” 36–37, 171 “Plan of Delano,” 10–12, 14 Poivre, Pierre, 89 Poor People’s Campaign (1968), 189 Popular Front, 73, 119, 179 Port Huron Statement, 14, 46 Portillo, Lourdes, 75 Proposition 63, 167 Proposition 187, 126 Proposition 227, 167 Puerto Rico, 8, 79 Quirarte, Jacinto, 108 Radio Act of 1927, 81 Ramírez, Francisco, 166 rasquache, 79, 136 Reagan, Ronald, 3, 17, 26, 28, 173, 180, 221n90; El Teatro Campesino and, 160; feminism and, 32; gays and lesbians and, 32, 128–29 Rechy, John, 173 Redstockings Manifesto, 14 Rendón, Armando, 79, 186 Republican party, 22, 194, 221n90; corporations and, 159, 220n88, 221n90; Latino/a outreach, 3; 1960s and 17, 28. See also conservatives Rios, Isabella, 174 Rivera, José, 109 Rodriguez, Pedro, 109 Rodriguez, Richard, 168 Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, 25 Salazar, Ruben, 58, 60, 74, 80 Salt of the Earth (1954), 101 Sandoval, Arturo, 86, 87 Self-Help Graphics (Los Angeles), 35 SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), 13, 22, 46, 90 social movements: art and, 38–39; emotion and, 79; in history, 1, 26, 31, 139–40; mass media, 28–29, 47, 55; 1960s and, 16; violence and, 100; women in, 188 Solís Sager, Maria (Manuela), 118, 179, 186 Southwest Voter Registration Project, 10, 33

Spanish language, 5–6, 40, 42, 51, 71, 166–70. See also multilingualism Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 22, 46 Tenayuca, Emma: biography, 118–19, 178– 79; Communist Party, 119, 179; cultural nationalism and, 179–80; “The Mexican Question in the Southwest,” 179 Tijerina, Reies López: biography, 214n54; coalitions, 84; environmentalism and, 98–101; leadership debates and, 26, 171; radio and television, 56, 76, 99 transnationalism, 14, 41, 196; labor politics and, 118, 149, 180; music and, 16; theater and, 137, 138; visual arts and, 109, 125 Treviño, Jesus, 35, 74, 75 Treviño, Jose, 108 United Farm Workers (UFW), 10, 12, 126, 188; cultural nationalism and, 78; environmentalism, 39, 128; gays and lesbians and, 36; grape strike, 52–55, 66, 98, 105, 133, 138; immigration and, 133; Native Americans and, 106; pesticide campaign, 55, 98, 205n24; Radio Campesina, 76; television, 45–46, 52–56; in U.S. history textbooks, 13–14. See also El Teatro Campesino United Mexican American Students (UMAS), 77 U.S. Congress, 119; Census and, 4; Congressional Hispanic Caucus, 9; environmentalism and, 86; 91, immigration and 141, 142; 1960s and, 20 Valdez, Daniel, 104 Valdez, Luis, 10, 12, 35, 134; influences on, 139; leadership and, 139; Vasconcelos, José, 106, 201n74 Vasquez, Enriqueta, 83, 93–96, 107 Vasquez, Richard, 82, 173 Vásquez, Tiburcio, 25 Velasquez, William C., 10, 109 Vietnam War: Chicano activism and, 23, 58, 64, 77; elegies and 17, 19; feminism and, 84–85; 1960s; political apathy and, 43. See also under El Teatro Campesino Villareal, José Antonio, 82, 173 Viramontes, Helena María, 172, 174, 222n9

index / 233 whites: Anglo-Saxonism, 61, 141, 146, 194; civil rights, opposition to, 17; civil rights, support of, 77, 211n8; counterculture, 16, 23, 58, 95; demographics, 42; environmentalism, 86, 90–91, 101; as gringos, 211; Hurricane Katrina and,

11–12; Latinos/as and whiteness, 8, 188n28; as victims, 41, 63, 160, 165 Zapata Liberation Front, 57 Zoot Suit Riots, 13, 80, 223n20. See also pachucos/pachucas

About the Author

Randy J. Ontiveros is Associate Professor of English and an affiliate in U.S. Latina/o Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.