40 yrs of Chicano Studies

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Old 10-14-2009, 10:11 PM
ilbegone ilbegone is offline
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Rodriguez 3)

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The sixties were years of romance for the American middle class. Americans competed with one another to play the role of society's victim...

In those years, the national habit of Americans was to seek from the comparison with blacks a kind of analogy. Mexican American political activists, especially student activists, insisted on a rough similarity between the two societies – black, Chicano – ignoring any complex factor of history or race that might disqualify the equation.

Black Americans had suffered relentless segregation and mistreatment, but blacks had been implicated in the public life of this country from the beginning. Oceans separated the black slave from any possibility of rescue or restoration. From the symbiosis of oppressor and the oppressed, blacks took a hard realism. They acquired the language of the white man, though they inflected it with refusal. And because racism fell on all blacks,regardless of class, a bond formed between the poor and bourgeoisie, thence the possibility of a leadership class able to speak for the entire group.

Mexican Americans of the generation of the sixties had no myth of themselves as Americans. So that when Mexican Americans won national notoriety, we could only refer the public gaze to the past. We are people of the land, we told ourselves. Middle class college students took to wearing farmer-in-the-dell overalls and they took, as well, a rural slang to name themselves: Chicanos.

Chicanismo blended nostalgia with grievance to reinvent the mythic northern kingdom of Aztlan as corresponding to the southwestern American desert. Just as Mexico would only celebrate her Indian half, Chicanos determined to portray themselves as Indians in America, as indigenous people, thus casting the United States in the role of Spain.

Chicanos used the language of colonial Spain to declare to America that they would never give up their culture. And they said, in Spanish, that Spaniards had been the oppressors of their people.

Left to ourselves in a protestant land, Mexican Americans shored up our grievances, making them alters to the past...

Ah, Mother, can you not realize how Mexican we have become?

But she hates us, she hates us.