40 yrs of Chicano Studies

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Old 10-14-2009, 10:15 PM
ilbegone ilbegone is offline
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Chicanismo offended Mexico. It was one thing for Mexico to play the victim among her children, but Mexico didn't like it that Chicanos were playing the same role for the gringos.

By claiming too many exemptions, Chicanos also offended Americans. Chicanos seemed to violate a civic agreement that generations of other immigrants had honored: “My grandparents had to learn English.”...

In the late 1960's, when Cesar Chavez made the cover of time as the most famous Mexican American anyone could name, he was already irrelevant to to Mexican-American lives insofar as 90 percent of us lived in cities and were more apt to work in construction than as farm workers...

Politics can easily override irony. But, by the late 1980's, the confusing “we” of Mexican Americanism was transposed an octave higher to the “we” of pan-American Hispanicism.

Mexican Americans constituted the majority of the nation's Hispanic population. But Mexican Americans were in no position to define the latitude of of the term “Hispanic” - the tumult of pigments and alters and memories there. “Hispanic" is not a racial or a cultural or a geographic or a linguistic or an economic description. "Hispanic" is a bureaucratic integer – a complete political fiction. How much does a central American refugee have in common with the Mexican from Tijuana? What does the black Puerto Rican in New York have in common with the white Cuban in Mimi? Those Mexican Americans in a position to speak for the group – whatever the group was – that is, those of us with access to microphones because of affirmative action, were not even able to account for our own success. Or were we advancing on the backs of those who were drowning?